The Windy Willows Love Letters
by katherine-with-a-k
Summary: What did Anne and Gilbert write to each other when they had "just the right pen"? This story goes beyond those dot dot dots...
1. Rings and Things

**Hello there! This story follows Anne of Windy Willows (also known as Anne of Windy Poplars) where I am attempting to add more detail to those letters between Anne and Gilbert. A note to new readers, though it can be read as a stand alone story it will feature details from my previous stuff, Redmond Diaries particularly. (I'll footnote it for you should it not make sense :o)  
**

 **Dedicated to AlinyaAlethia whose work introduced me to the joy of epistolary writing, and to FKAJ for her trippy encouragement.**

 **As always my love and gratitude to L.M.M. ~everything is hers, only this idea is mine.**

 **THE WINDY WILLOWS LOVE LETTERS**

 **I**

 _ **Harvey House, Redmond, Kingsport, N.S.**_

 _ **September 18th, 1887**_

 _Dear Anne,_

 _-let me begin that again._

 _Dearest, loveliest Anne,_

 _As you see I have the right sort of pen, I don't think I'll ever have it out of my hand. How long has it been since I've held one of your letters? Years, I'd say. And it felt like years. You call your latest merciless? Tell me you'll always be that unforgiving._

 _So Rachel Lynde succeeded in accompanying you to Summerside after all. Was it really to see an old friend as she said, or because she suspected I'd hidden myself behind a Pringle topiary? I keep expecting to see you here, catch a glimpse of your hair or that black tam you used to wear. The tang of excitement I felt when we both lived in Kingsport is absent without you._

 _As you so generously described your surroundings, your room particularly (I am irrationally jealous of that blue doughnut cushion lazing about your window seat) it's only fair I provide you with a picture of my own. And while I lack gigantic beds and turrets I think I can be as satisfied here as you are in your new found home._

 _I've been placed in Harvey -be sure to add that to my address, I don't want to wait a day longer for your letters than I need to. It's the oldest hall on campus, by which I mean it's cold and dark. This isn't helped by all the trees that surround it but I hardly mind, I need them about me as much as you do. The way you described tree shadows, Anne, as a living tapestry, is exactly right. My window looks out to a sprawling beech. A fine old gent he is too, though he has suffered the indignity of a Moody style haircut and had half his branches removed. I can picture my younger self shimmying down it after curfew, looking for trouble. But being a respectable medical student of 25 -engaged to a published author and B.A. no less- I don't expect to miss those branches overly much. Unless you had a hankering to climb up to me. You're rather fond of beeches, aren't you?_

 _At this moment I am sitting on a very narrow, very squeaky bed. It was originally next to my desk but I have since shoved it under the window. In the middle of the room on a tired old rug is a velvet armchair, which looks a lot like the one you had in your room at Patty's Place -minus the blood. That reminds me, above the fireplace looms a gigantic painting of an eminent McDonald. He has that much hair sprouting out of his nose and ears I can't help hope the same fate awaits his great (great?) grandson. I was gratified to hear the weasel has slunk off to B.C. which means both my nose and his are safe for the foreseeable. There is second chair on the other side of the hearth and a second bed in the opposite corner, both currently empty. A Mr Edvard Rasmussen arrives tomorrow from Christine's hometown in Halifax, and that's all I know of the man. Not that I'm bothered, the Cooper prize is not my only accomplishment. I also survived of two years co-habitation with Charlie Sloane._

 _A letter from Fred arrived with the first post which mentioned old Charlie had a falling out with his Pandora. Poor fellow. It seems she had little idea about his intentions and assumed he was courting her cousin -the woman Charlie called 'the chaperone'. I hope he doesn't think of renewing his addresses to a certain headmistress of Summerside highschool. You keep that pearl ring right where I put it, Miss Shirley.  
_

 _Anne, I want to ask something. I've never known you to hide your true feelings before, but we've never been engaged before. And as you will have gathered by this awkward letter I am forcing myself not to throw into the fire, I am struggling to put this new world into words and wonder if you are too. So please, tell me if your engagement ring is truly all you wanted? Mother meant well when she offered it, meant more than you might comprehend, and I know you meant well by agreeing to the idea. But now you've had time to get used to seeing it everyday are you certain you don't wish for something new? I used to imagine giving you something green, a peridot perhaps. I now realise I have just revealed an extremely sentimental and -given the odds- extremely optimistic dream of mine. I believe this letter writing will put me in all sorts of deep water. But I can keep up with the current if you can._

 _The bell is sounding the quarter hour, meaning I must get back into a collar and tie for yet another interview with another Head of Department. They are all insisting on meeting yours truly. It wouldn't surprise me if my classmates thought my name was Cooper._

 _I thought I would have finished this letter by now. I can't explain why my words are coming so slowly, but don't ever take it to mean you are not-_

 _always and ever in my thoughts,_

 _GILBERT BLYTHE_

 _P.S. Because I know you like them._

 _It's just before midnight and I have given myself the challenge of writing as much as I can before the bell strikes twelve. Collar and tie are off again, buttons all undone. If you ever write to Mother let her know I must have put on ten pounds from all the dinners I've attended this week. She's more likely to believe it coming from you._

 _I miss you, Anne. I have just read over your letter again and want to thank you for writing something so bursting with life and with you. Especially considering the beating your knuckles took after mistaking that man's bald head for an arm rest. What is it with you and heads? I spent a minute thinking up some revenge upon the fellow, then a lot longer thinking of you tucked up in your turret at Windy Willows under the doting eye of Kate, Chatty and Rebecca Dew (you're right, Rebecca must have her Dew.)_

 _What I think about most is whether you are thinking about me._

 _It will seem impossible to a woman of letters like yourself, but the writing of that last sentence took me long past midnight. I should go to bed, but don't ever think that because my reply is shorter I have less to say._

 _G.J.B._

 **… … …**

 _ **Windy Willows, Spooks Lane, Summerside, P.E.I.**_

 _ **September 26th**_

 _...to wish I was there now with... with... guess whom?_

 _Do you know, Gilbert, there are times when I strongly believe I love you!_

 _Your letter was just now delivered by the highly observant Rebecca Dew, who not only discovered me in my secret (no longer!) dappled grove, but deduced that you are left handed. I can well imagine her holding my mail up to a good strong light before passing it on to me. Don't laugh, Gilbert, but perhaps you should get into the habit of putting your letters inside two envelopes!_

 _Let me admit something to you now, though a clever fellow like yourself may have already guessed, that I began writing the letter you hold in your hands long before I received your reply. I'm afraid I like writing to you far too much to actually require a response before I start anew. This may be due to the fact that I miss our conversations, and our rambles, and all the time that was lost to us. Though I have I sneaking suspicion it is simply because I miss you._

 _Firstly I am relieved to hear you survived my first letter ~shall I tell you how often I nestle into that blue doughnut cushion with unseemly abandon? I haven't fallen out of bed again, but the year is yet young. 'Never say never', as Aunt Kate likes to say. Secondly I must address the question you had about my little circlet. It may take some time, however, so if you were wanting to go off to do something worthy and useful then go right ahead. We shall wait for you, this letter and I. Because as someone else I know likes to say~_

 _Waiting for things is half the pleasure of them._

 _You write that I must be used to my ring by now. I have to tell you there moments I am so astonished to see it on my hand it brings me to tears ~you were right about pearls, I think. Because whenever I look at it, and I am quite as shameless as Diana on that score and find myself caressing and admiring it a thousand times a day, I can't help but remember the moment you put it there. Then I remember how I close I was to losing you, and then, most miraculously of all that you (still!) love me. How many years have passed since we first met? I am sure you know, but allow me tell you the answer is twelve. Twelve years! And concerning those years I have something else to share that you may not know. There are exactly fifteen tiny pearls encircling my ring.  
_

 _When you mentioned there was something your mother wanted me to have I assumed it would be a recipe (requiring indecent amounts of gooseberries no doubt) or perhaps a photograph. I have three already, but Josie is draped all over your shoulder at the AVIS farewell, and you don't look like you at Diana's wedding. The best is from Convocation, but that picture features the enormous head of Doctor Meade, and even though I have trimmed him from the newsprint his right ear still intrudes upon your beautiful face. Promise me you'll send a photograph of your own sweet self ~and soon!_

 _I never expected you to show me a ring. That it was your grandmother's ~whose infamous marriage advice I am all but forced to ignore, being neither able to keep an eye on you or feed you~ is especially wonderful. Coming from such venerable old stock as Blythes you can't know what it means to me; besides my parents' letters I own nothing that holds any memory. Truly I am a blank slate. Not that I could say that to your mother ~though I imagine it might make your father laugh._

 _Do you think one day she might love me as I love her? Yes, I love her. How could I fail to love the woman who brought you into the world? How could I fail to adore her family's ring. Your ring. The moment I saw it I knew I would never take it off, not for any peridot, let alone a diamond. Every part of it seems meant for me, especially the man who placed it on my finger._

 _It became real then, didn't it? Everything around us seemed to disappear ~the parlour, your parents and all those cats, the fact that you would be leaving for Redmond the next morning~ yet it all felt terribly, wonderfully real. I am going to be your wife! And as much as I wish we might begin our married life tomorrow I think I will need these three years to get used to the idea. How did it happen, Gilbert? Tell me the story of us._

 _I eagerly await your reply, (if you dare to burn your letters, Gilbert Blythe, you shall discover how truly merciless I can be!) and ask you to brace yourself for the letter I am already composing in my head._

 _Ever and always yours,_

 _MRS (FUTURE) BLYTHE_

 _P.S. Because I suspect you like them too. Is Mr Rasmussen arrived from Halifax, is he acquainted with Miss Stuart ~ does she still intend to marry?_

 **… … …**

* first two lines of Anne's letter taken from the last two lines of a letter from Anne's to Gilbert in chapter two of Anne of Windy Willows

* the references to the MacDonald weasel, the chair, and the bloody nose, are from RD2, chapter XVII

* the answer to the beech tree question is in RD3, chapter XXVII

 **Thank you for reading. A bit of a stilted beginning, but I reasoned those two would be very much feeling their way, just like I am. Hopefully I'll get the hang of this soon.**


	2. Left and Right

**II**

 **Harvey House, Redmond, K'port**

 **October 2nd** _ **  
**_

 _My Anne-est of Annes,_

 _If you can write like that without the right sort of pen I doubt I will survive the result when you do procure one -though I should like to find out. By happy co incidence I am able to dedicate the same dusky hour to your letters. No Doctor or Professor of any salt would consider holding class during tea, leaving me the wild pleasures of an entire hour to spend as I please from Monday till Saturday. For the rest I am taken up with 18 hours of lectures, 21 hours of labs and a half day at Imperial hospital._

 _I assumed the latter would be the most interesting (you are familiar, are you not Miss Shirley, with how hands on I like to be?) Unfortunately lowly first years aren't permitted to do more than trot meekly behind a nurse. The doctors refuse to acknowledge us until we have survived the trial by fire that is second year. Those poor wrecks are wading through a sixty hour week. I used to wonder at the fashion for beards amongst medical students but I've come to the conclusion they simply lack time to shave. My clean cut mug is looking distinctly provincial, especially compared to the the lavish display under Mr Rasmussen's nose. If I tell you he goes by the name The Fox you might imagine what his moustache looks like. Not only its thickness and flare, Anne, but the colour. Like Viking's blood, he says. The fellow is spectacularly pleased with his flaming red mop -which makes a change._

 _My first thought was how much I would like him to meet you, but now I'm not so sure. The Redmond rumour mill has it that he is the reason my beech tree lost half its limbs. No one has been able to catch him at it -he is not The Fox for nothing- but apparently Ed Rasmussen made good use of those branches last year. He is repeating his first year of medicine, insisting he has no head for chemistry, though I suspect the real reason is his preoccupation with nursing students. This year's intake have so far resisted his brown eyed, burly charms, most of them tending to the upright, no nonsense character of Ada Corke._

 _Did you ever meet her, Anne? Those weeks in July are still so hazy. I can't explain it any better than to say it felt like I was being battered against a door, afraid I would never break through, and even more afraid of what lay on the other side. Then just like that, clear as clear, I could hear your voice. (If you want to know what I heard you say you'll have to wait until I see you, there aren't enough envelopes to keep that concealed.) When I awoke I was as thin as a child, the stars on my ceiling had vanished, and you were no longer marrying Gardner. Gulliver could not have been more surprised than I was. I made Mother read out Phil's letter to me that many times she could recite it by heart._

 _She is very fond of you Anne, please don't spend another moment doubting it. That wary look that hides inside her eyes -it's clear you've seen it- has been there since Pup was struck ill fifteen years ago. Hers is a watchful sort of love, but it is also unreserved. Remember she has only just claimed me back from the grave. And now I am engaged. To Anne Shirley!_

 _You know, I would have felt the sting of your remark that you need three years to get used to the idea of us being married if I didn't feel so exactly the same. You ask me to tell you the story of us. I wonder if it would be better to begin with the story of myself, and I hope you will honour me with a tale of your own._

 _It was curious to read you describe me as left handed, until I realised I always use my left hand when_ _I'm_ _with you. Whenever I sat near you in class or exams, anytime we played word games or planned out our debates, you would have seen my words take on that strange slant I had to master in order to stop smudging the ink. Is that why you were determined that I should have a first rate fountain pen when we went off to Redmond, in hopes I might write something legible? You could have no way of knowing this but I only revert to my left hand when I feel strained or nervous. And you made me extremely nervous. I never knew from one minute to the next just who you were going to be, or who I would become when I was around you._

 _At any other time I can pretty well make my right hand obey. I have no option, left handedness is not a trait to be encouraged (much like fiery tempers or lucid imaginations). I have strong memories of my great uncle David warning Mother to bind up my left hand so that I would come to rely on my right -though I have no memory of her following his advice. By the time I returned from Alberta with Pup when I was almost thirteen I could no more write with my right hand than I could my right foot. Enter Mr Philips, the new Avonlea schoolmaster and eternal idiot. It didn't matter to him what I knew, if I couldn't demonstrate it with my right hand then I was a dunce. He decided to keep me back with the ten year olds, and I decided to give up trying to prove I didn't belong there. Until you convinced me otherwise._

 _I could about stand to hear my old chums talk of Queens while I languished on the third reader, and tolerate being babied by girls the same age as I was. I could even endure the prospect of making a farmer of myself. What I couldn't do was see you dare to have a dream for yourself and not want one of my own. I suppose that's what I meant when I told you I loved you since the day you broke that slate over my head. But I think what really happened was that somehow you and ambition and passion got all mixed up together. It took Muriel Stacey to untangle it all and set me and my handwriting straight. Have you heard from her, Anne? I received a letter from her on Monday, offering her congratulations on our 'incredible' news._

" _I would like to be able to tell you how unsurprised I am. But honestly I am surprised. I feel like a child who has finally relinquished her belief in faery and then discovered an elf under her hat."_

 _I know how she feels._

 _Anne, I did want to continue but I have a hike to make in order to get to my last class. Bandaging from 7-9pm. I would forgo part of it in order to keep on pretending that I'm sitting here talking to you. But Dr Garvey has said the best two students may assist with basic dressings in the clinic tomorrow, and I promised The Fox I would win it for us -did I tell you I spent half the summer at the Glen bandaging Aunt Pearl's spaniel? He's heard there is a new nurse in the burns ward, The Fox not Jiffy. What a strange way to end a letter. But you would engage yourself to a medical student, and as I pass the post box on the way to the lecture hall, and have only one envelope on me, I think I will leave it here._

 _Sending you love, and if there is something even stronger than love I am sending that too. I think you will need a large arsenal in order to deal to those persnickety Pringles. But if anyone can do it, Anne, it's you._

 _Gil_

 _P.S. I forgot to mention I've been invited to celebrate my birthday at Patterson Street. Priss is to be there too._

 _Oh that you were._

 _P.P.S. Would you consider that a dare, Miss Shirley?_

 **… … …**

 _ **Windy Willows, Spook's Lane, S'side**_

 _ **October 10th**_

 _Honoured and Respected Sir,_

 _That is how a love letter of Aunt Chatty's grandmother began. Isn't it delicious? What a thrill of superiority it must have given the grandfather! Wouldn't you really prefer it to 'Gilbert darling' etc? But on the whole I think I'm glad you're not the grandfather... or a grandfather. It's wonderful to think we're young and have our whole lives before us... together... isn't it?_

 _I am so burstingly filled with dreams of our future I'd rather not talk of the past. You don't want to know about those days, Gilbert. And I really don't want to remember them. Perhaps one day I will, but for now let me picture out the years that are yet to be lived._

 _We shall have such a house when we are married. A House of Dreams! But here I come unstuck in my imaginings (yes, it's possible) because I long for a cosy cottage, one that can barely contain the love that we have for each other. Have you ever been in such a house? You may well encounter one on Patterson Street~_

 _~by the by, I knew before you did about your invitation to the Blakes. I might have ever so possibly put the idea into Phil's head. And now I am going to put one in yours. Please be sure to observe Priscilla Grant very closely. The Reverend Jo has a certain young missionary staying with them at the moment who happens to be oh so incidentally mentioned in Priss's letters oh so many more times than I think she is aware of~_

 _Phil writes so giddily of her little burrow (her word not mine) that you may find yourself squeezed out by the happiness crammed beneath her roof. It is just the sort of house I wish for us. One that throbs with all the love that we have for each other and leaves no room for anything else. It's a very selfish wish, I know. But when I have you ~when I finally, utterly and completely have you~ I want you all to myself._

 _And what shall I do with you, once I have you? Well, Mr Blythe, this is where my imagination goes into battle with itself. Because I want to love you (finally, utterly and completely) in every room in our little house. But a cottage has so few rooms, so then I begin to wonder whether an enormous rambling mansion wouldn't be more satisfying. One with endless places to love you endlessly._

 _And how shall I love you in all those rooms? Slowly. So very slowly. I want to spend an hour getting acquainted with the whorls on your index finger. A day introducing myself to the lines on your palm. A week to discover what your other hip looks like.  
_

 _You said you like to think of me thinking of you. And I do -oh I do! I lie against the sun warmed pillows on my window seat and close my eyes and imagine we are under the apple tree. That last evening we spent together when I mentioned the night we lay under its branches in the days after Ruby died. And you told me how you always adored watching me lie in the grass; the way I cradle my head with my arm and nuzzle my mouth against the soft skin by my elbow. You said you wanted to know what it felt like to place your mouth where mine had been. Then you reached for my hand, the tremble in yours went right through me, and the feel of your lips was iridescent. You sucked on my wrist like it was a plum stone and it was bliss, bliss, bliss._

 _I urged you to take my other arm and leaned against your chest. Truly I was lying on it. I knew it wasn't right, Gil, but I didn't care. When you felt the weight of my breast upon yours I heard you make this sound. It had such heft and muscle yet was soft as a butterfly's wing. You were looking up at me as though you wanted to be sure, truly sure, it was me you were kissing. And the air was filled with the smell of crushed grass and fallen apples...  
_

 _Oh I want to know_ _all of you. Your letter made me so hungry for you because you sounded like Gilbert again. And I forgot my woes at work and remembered everything... and then longed for the things I have yet to discover. _

_Not left handed at all, but both handed! I wish I had known what trials you had been through. To me you were this hen house rooster, with the cocksure swagger of someone who is handsome and clever and knows it. Oh, I had you all sized up, but you would keep disappointing my expectations. Thoughtful when I pegged you as thoughtless, persistent when I wished you complacent, in love with me when you were meant to be in love with someone else. And let me tell you how stupidly happy I am to have all my expectations come to nothing._

 _Even better, let me show you._

 _I'm imagining we're lying on the grass again. It's the sort of night that drips with the heat of the day and it pours over us, so our clothes stick to our backs and those little curls at your nape look like wet eyelashes. The ground in delectably cool and the air is hot and heavy. There's just the faintest aroma of the last of the strawberries coming from the barrens and the sound of the waves carried on the wind. It's so quiet I can't bring myself to speak ~you know how I am about silences~ until the breeze swells and rushes over my damp skin. I'm so aware of my body, so conscious of yours lying next to me. I can't help myself, and I turn to you and say (here you may imagine where I am pointing)_

 _Kiss me here, Gil  
_

 _and here_

 _and here_

 _and here_

 _and here_

 _and here_

 _and here..._

 **… … …**

 _ *****_ **Gilbert's timetable comes courtesy of a first year medical student's timetable from 1888 (thorough, that's me)**

 ***Ada Corke and the stars are mentioned in chapter XXXIX, RD4**

 ***Pup is Gilbert's father**

 ***Opening paragraph is from a letter from Anne to Gilbert in Chapter 2, Anne of Windy Willows**

 ***The apple tree memory refers to chapter XIV, RD2  
**

 **Thank you for reading! I am overwhelmed, utterly, totally, completely -to paraphrase Miss Shirley- at the response to my first chapter. To have so many readers come back for more is a crazy and beautiful thing. I promise I will work hard to make this story a good one.**

 **Liz Dexic -** thank you for letting me know you were waiting for these Letters. I was very undecided about whether I would try and write them, so your prodding was good for me. I don't imagine push-ups will be something Gilbert will necessarily share with Anne, but you know and I know the boy will be getting a good work out ;o)

 **Guest:** Thanks!

 **Bertha:** You are a darling to come out of hibernation and review me, I miss you.

 **Vicky:** I get the 'queer little aches' when you post too (and roflmao when I read you)

 **PelirrojaBiu:** Soooooo cool to hear from you again. I hoped I would, I love the way you see things in my stories -and yes, rest assured there will be Ts, would I be K with a K otherwise? By the way did you read The Essence of the Thing? What did you think?

 **Enna:** Thank you so much for coming back for more. I haven't forgotten No More Owed, expect loads more reviews because it's an incredible story.

 **Mountainrivergirl:** Yay, you're back too. I'm glad you picked up on the fact that diaries are different to letters, things get a lot more censored and polite. But the more these two write to each other the more I think this will change ;o)

 **Crowning Glories:** I agree, texts are not half as romantic. Might be an interesting modern day Anne story though... but I think Anne would definitely be an email girl.

 **Alinya:** I shall have to dedicate every story I ever write here to you I think. If I didn't have you to inspire me and put up with my ramblings I would have given up.

 **Astrakelly:** Thank you my dear

 **Edkchestnut:** So glad to hear from you again. Yes I thought I'd get that ring scene in because I knew that readers would like to know what happened. You're exactly right about Sarah worrying about Gilbert finding the money for a ring, and it just felt right to me that the pearl circlet came from the Blythes. The casual question about Christine made me laugh too -and he still hasn't answered her! (Just like a man)

 **Hecalledmecarrots:** Thanks for your kind words. I haven't read your story, mostly because I have a dread of getting your ideas and mine confused. Bertha Willis' story of Diana's wedding was so perfect I couldn't think of anything better, and I don't want to go through the same thing again. But you're right, there is plenty of scope for the imagination -that's what's so cool about ff. Goodluck with your story :o)

 **Ella:** Goddess of the fridge magnet! Thrilled to have you back again. I hope to keep you hashtagging for a good long while, so I wish you well with your techno woes. I feels ya. DAT CUSHION DOE -straight to t-shirt!

 **GoDons:** Glad you have my back, mate

 **FKAJ:** Girl you already know what I want to say...

 **Lilies:** Thanks so much, thinking I made you smile for a while is about the best compliment you could give me. I see you've been busy too, time for me to get stuck into Never Let Go.

 **Diana:** I love to think of you doing a happy dance. Breath of fresh air -my favourite and most cherished compliment, thank you darling. How is your latest Sherlock story going? Can't get enough of your Mycroft.

 **Delusional Musings:** Cheers, my dear :o)


	3. Within and Without

**Mostly healed, all happy. I was overwhelmed by your messages and support, it kept me going and made me want to write something beautiful for you. I was able to use a pen more easily than a keyboard so I made sure I kept up my writing until I was well enough to type it up. It's all here, the entire first year, all the way to June, twelve whole chapters. Much longer than I anticipated but these two had so much more to discover about each other than I first thought. I expect the second and third year to be far shorter. Then again...**

 **So thank you, and read away knowing you won't have to wait for the next installment -that's my present to you :o)**

 **With love and gratitude to L.M.M. and the boy with a less sad girl**

 **... ... ...**

 **III**

 **Windy Willows, Spook's Lane, S'side**

 **October 15th**

 _Darlingest Gilbert,_

 _I suppose my latest letter has only now been delivered. You may have noticed I happened to have just the right pen that particular evening. Neither stubby nor scratchy nor sharp, but overflowing with an inky impulsiveness I couldn't help but to give into._

 _Since then I have been writhing with anxiety about its arrival ~and its contents. What if you should receive it on your way to class, and decide to open it during a tedious but extremely crowded lecture on bandaging? (I'm not one to teach a grandmother how to suck eggs, Gil ~I sometimes doubt my ability to teach anything at all~ but why so many hours on such a topic? Surely a roll of gauze can be wound about a person ~or a spaniel~ only so many ways.)_

 _What if you left my letter half read on your desk and this Fox happened upon it ~and then happened upon me! I could never meet him then, though he sounds entirely meet-able. I am curious to see what colour this 'flaming mop' actually is? If it's a tamer shade than my own then I shall know exactly how red you consider my hair._

 _Oh, forgive me for sounding so prickly. I've had one of those days where I've been snagged and poked at every corner. I should cease haunting the post office and rejoice in the fact I can write to you at all. Instead I begrudge the four days that must pass for my letter to reach you, knowing even then you are likely to be called on to do something learned and necessary instead of reply to a cantankerous headmistress. (But reply to her anyway, Gil, tell her she hasn't ruined apple trees for you forever.)_

 _I hope you at least have a chance to eat in this one hours grace you have each evening. If you come back at Christmas no fatter than you were in September the people of Allwinds may well look sharply, and not unreasonably, in the direction of a certain highschool in Summerside._

 _Now I sound even crosser. Well if I am to be this Anne today this Anne I shall be. I can't tell you what a relief it is to know you know the worst of me and love me anyway. I can have nights of velvet ink, Gilbert Blythe, and days of Jonah ~though they are beginning to feel like weeks._

 _Today we heard there had been a burglary..._

 _ **… … …**_

 **Harvey House, Redmond, K'port**

 **October 20th**

Letter the first...

 _Dear Anne,_

 _Thank you for your letters. Your second arrived exactly in time for my birthday, as did your gift. A very soft, very green, very familiar scarf. As I held it I missed you dearly (missed is not even close to the word, but words will not do my bidding at the moment -nor my right hand) and my 26 year old self felt very small souled knowing you were still waiting for my reply._

 _This is partially due to my own foolishness. Somehow I have ended up on a rowing team. In the hours where I am not struck dumb by your words or struck cold with the stench of the sheep's heart I am dissecting, I have been endeavouring to build myself up to more Blythe-like proportions. The Fox assumed I was planning to try out for a place with the first years and pulled me along to the trials. I guess my arms have gained back much of their strength because I made the B crew (The Fox is an old hand and rows for the As) and now the two of us are up at the river by five every morning, excepting Sundays of course -be sure to tell Rachel that- or when The Fox is otherwise engaged. What might keep him busy in the hours before dawn I dare not recount to a cantankerous headmistress. But my Anne of exquisite inky imaginings may think up some likely possibilities._

 _Consequently I am bone tired most of the time. But worry not, Mrs Future Blythe, it is a good useful tired that sends me to a good, much needed sleep. What sort of letter writer it makes me I am not so sure, but I hope I am at least capable of answering your questions._

 _Firstly Christine is still set to marry. I know this from Christine herself, having recently received an invitation to their engagement party: To my dear Mr Blythe -and guest. I'm unsure why you are addressed as 'guest', I wrote her of our engagement weeks ago. The invitation must have been printed before she received our news. What do you say, Anne? Mr Dawson is hiring the entire first floor of the Rutherford. I would enjoy the chance to show off my girl, and have you and Christine become better acquainted. It's for the December 20th, so let me know if those Pringles and the frozen Brooke will deign to relinquish you a day early._

 _Yes I am eating. I have the appetites of a seventeen year old boy. All of them._

 _As to bandaging, I am tempted to send you the 600 page text that describes those bindings -or better yet practice upon you instead._

 _I observed our Priss at the Blake's last night but am loathe to guess where her affections lie. I would say she appears quite smitten but have since learned the hard way that appearances can be deceiving._

 _The object of her (possible?) affections is a very brilliant man. Willard Mackin has a Masters in theology and linguistics, and has been living in a Mission on the northern most island of Japan for the past two years. I could infuriate you with descriptions of his hair, black, his eyes, brown, his nose, neither as straight as mine nor as crooked as Jo's, and his build, languid and lean, and leave it there. But being the Anne you are, I know what you really want me to tell you is whether Mr Mackin is the kindred kind. And in this I will say he is clever without making a fellow feel ignorant, entertaining without needing applause, and has the look of a man very much in love -being familiar with those symptoms I am confident in that diagnosis at least._

 _The Blakes were as garrulous as ever. Phil still won't forgive you for refusing Bolingbroke Ladies College. I never knew they wanted you for a principal, what made you decide against it? Are you sure you don't regret that decision now you have discovered a clan more Sloanish than Sloanes and more Pye-ous than Pyes? Don't take their snubs to heart, my girl, only a saint could withstand Pringles. And while you may be many women, Anne Shirley, a saint you are not. Neither am I. I should aspire to be the sort of man who pities them. But I would rather pelt the lot with the contents of the slop trough. (You will comprehend the depths of my depravity when I tell you said trough contains the remains of a day's dissection by 116 first years.)_

 _It is time for me to lug that 600 page textbook off for my last class of the day. You'll be happy to know the Fox and I managed to win those four hours redressing wounds at Imperial, alongside a decidedly unCorke-like nurse named, Dorelia Swales -who is the reason The Fox is currently nailing planks down the trunk of my beech tree._

 _There aren't words to tell you how I miss you. But I have been trying to find them. For evidence see the letter that is wrapped within this one. It was supposed to be a love letter and even if it isn't all I wish it could be I wrote it thinking only of you.  
_

 _Yours (all of me)_

 _Gilbert_

Letter the second...

 _My love,_

 _You said you were sorry for being so prickly. In truth I was relieved. It forced me to get my head out of your letter and put the right sort of pen in my hand. Words come easily to you, I didn't consider how you must have anticipated my reply. I am so used to giving you the best of myself, it's not in me to send something that doesn't meet that standard._

 _Coming to the end of your apple tree letter was like waking up in a dream, the one where I have been preparing for the most important exam of my life then I turn the paper over and realise I have studied all the wrong things. I can't shake the feeling it was meant for someone else. It doesn't seem possible that Anne Shirley wrote it, that she wrote it for me. On campus I have become 'the man with the yellow envelope'. I can't stop reading it. It's me you have ruined not apple trees. I will never make it to Christmas. All I want is to make it back to you._

 _Knowing you considered a position in Bolingbroke is maddening. You could be thirty miles from me instead of two hundred. I am this close to getting the first ferry back to the Island. What I wouldn't give for an hour in your company. An hour to kiss you there... and there... and there..._

 _I sucked you like a plum stone? Never again can I eat that fruit in good christian company. Tell me I left you unbruised or the people at Green Gables will send more than sharp looks in my direction. I know it was a peculiar notion, wanting to kiss your arm, but you are hardly averse to the strange. It was what I told you that made me nervous. I was afraid you would think that any time we lay beneath that tree -or any tree- I'd been consumed with thoughts of kissing you. I promise you, Anne, you mean more to me than a girl I want to kiss._

 _I want to make a life with you. And when I focus on the mountains of work ahead of me or the stroke of the oar in the river I believe I have it in me to wait. Then I look at a photograph of Fred and Diana holding their son, I catch the way Priscilla and Mr Mackin glance at each other, feel the heat come off the house on Patterson St and I want that for us. My thoughts are so bent upon our own little house -and the millions of rooms therein. You say you want a day to know my fingers, my hands. Anne, I want lifetimes._

 _And what shall I do with you once I have you? That I can't say. Not for the reason you think but because I want to see what kind of Anne you are first. Should you feel prickly and venomous I will give you something to kick against. If you are bursting with dreams then I plan to catch them. If you want to be kissed I will kiss you until you forget how to say the word 'here', and the air is filled with that sound you made when you pressed yourself against me._

 _I didn't make that sound, Anne, it was you. To be fair the muscle was probably mine, but the heft and softness were yours alone. Now I ask you to be fair and explain your desire to see my 'other hip'. When did you see the first? I can't think of a time your eyes were on me when I didn't know it. Please don't put the thought in my head that for all those years you were stealing looks at me or I really will think you merciless._

 _Though now I think on it I did note a certain admiration in the phrase, 'cocksure swagger'. But if I was the rooster in the henhouse, Anne, you were the fox. The feathers you ruffled in sweet old Avonlea. I was fascinated from the first, and so impatient for you to forgive me. In truth I expected it. Until the day I rescued you (some would say 'unnecessarily') at the pond. You looked as though you would rather drown than share air with me. I wanted to dislike you, I may have even succeeded for a minute, but what I remember most is the unaccountable sense of something gone wrong.  
_

 _Queens without your friendship was like soup without salt. Maybe I would have found a taste for bland offerings but then Matthew died. These memories flew back to me, of the days when I thought I was going to lose Pup. The aloneness was suffocating. It filled our house so completely we didn't walk through rooms so much as wade through them. The idea of you leaving Green Gables to live by yourself in a boarding house was more than wrong, it was unconscionable. I kept waiting for someone to ride in and rescue you. It sounds romantic, but when I took the school at White Sands I didn't do it to win you but to spare you._

 _I suppose you heard Pup was struck with consumption. We all knew it, though the word was never mentioned. Instead all the talk was of Alberta. I thought they were talking about a woman and made up my mind to do everything in my power to prevent her coming. Then one night Pup took me on his lap, lay our enormous atlas over my scabbed up knees and showed me where he was going. I traced my finger over the five thousand mile route and told him I was going too._

 _They have a wind that breathes into those prairies, Anne, a magic wind called a Chinook. It paints the sky red with arches a hundred miles wide. It can melt a foot of snow in an hour, it can blow an ox and cart onto its side. It can tumble you to pieces and it can save your life. That afternoon we went home to tell Mam and Pup about our engagement -though they needed no more telling than Marilla- and you asked me later what it was Pup called you. I said I wasn't sure, but I knew alright. He called you Chinook-girl. He's been calling you that ever since -I'll let you guess which incident prompted such a name- but I didn't know how to tell you. You seemed so uncertain about my folks accepting you, but I tell you, Anne, Pup loves that wind. He believes it mended him and that years later it stormed through the Island to mend me too._

 _Whenever I feel the wind I feel close to you, that's why I sleep by an open window.  
_

 _If I can't have you, Chinook-girl send me the wind_

 _ **... ... ...** _

***last line of Anne's letter from a letter from Anne to Gilbert in Chapter 2, Anne of Windy Willows**

 ***I couldn't find any name for Priss' missionary in the books, if he has one let me know, otherwise Wil Mackin it is**

 ***Anne's offer to work in Bolingbroke first mentioned in RD4, chapter XXXV**

 ***Mam is Gilbert's mother**

 ***That chinook stuff is all true! Where I come from it's called a Nor' Wester. Does anyone else have such a wind? _  
_**

 **Oh yes, Ada Corke isn't at Imperial hospital, the nursing staff merely resemble her tough minded, no nonsense ways**


	4. Stranger and Stranger

**IV**

 **Windy Willows, Spook's Lane, S'side**

 **25th October**

 _...'But you're not a stranger are you Miss Shirley?' Little Elizabeth asked me._

 _'No, darling.' I said. 'We've always known each other in Tomorrow.'_

 _I believe it too. But there are moments, Gil ~though I would never, ever tell her~ when I feel as if Little Elizabeth and I met each other in Yesterday._

 _Enough of my yesterdays, I want to know more of yours. As I read your letter I could feel that wind and it was like warm honey being poured all over me. There were great sweet dollops of you in every line and I licked it up and looked for more. Never think for one moment that your words need to meet some unreachable standard of perfect, my love. Our correspondence is all the more precious to me for not being polished and dignified. It's secret and searching and... sticky! Well, haven't I just left you with the image of my whole self being drenched in honey ~it sounds fun, I grant you, but imagine the mess! Well I want the mess! I've had enough carefully composed missives to fill five memoirs. I don't need perfect, I need you. (That came out wrong, but you are so scandalously in love with me, I think, to give me the benefit of the doubt.)_

 _In light of the munificent benefit you so often bestow on my undeserving self I want to say Something ~yes, the capital kind. And I shall try to make sense and weigh the next words carefully because its mentioning may confuse you. Worse, it might hurt you. But as I read your last letter, specifically your LOVE letter, I couldn't help think of... Roy._

 _I can hear your stomach drop from two hundred miles away. You are going to go somewhere quiet now, though knowing the sorts of letters I write I imagine you've done so already. Then you're going to put my letter down. Then you'll walk a little, these short sharp steps back and forth, then you'll pick up my letter and seek out the offending line, the sighting of which will cause you to drop it again. I'm not poking fun, Gil, I just want you to know that at the end of all that to-ing and fro-ing there will be Something very much worth reading. Something I want you to know._

 _You asked me not to put the idea in your head that I had been stealing looks at you. I know why you wrote that. Because over the years, piece by piece, you've put together a picture of me. Anne Shirley has a despicable temper. Anne Shirley holds unspeakable grudges. Anne Shirley can't see what's right in front of her. Anne Shirley would never (ever) notice a young man's hip._

 _~Incidentally your hip, and a very fine hip it is too, was seen only recently. You had just recovered from the fever and your clothes still hung loosely and your shirt came untucked and ...oh if I say it was an apple tree day you will know what I mean~_

 _Well, I have my own little list (confession: not so little) about you, too. And as I lay back under the scarlet arch you described and let swollen gusts of wild air fluster over me, I thought, Oh Gil, please don't confirm my suspicion that you possessed a poetic soul all along._

 _I already feel the fool for believing I was in love with Roy. I tell myself it was his way with words that seduced me ~though try as I might I can never recall the actual seduction. But nothing he wrote comes close to what I feel when I hold your words in my hands. There is a quality in your voice, in descriptions of your childhood especially, that makes me ache for the author. And I hold your letters tight to my breast, I smooth those pages over my face, I kiss the words and the spaces between, and I sleep on them at night._

 _The latter I don't recommend, having woken up late one morning I missed the fact that I had the phrase 'eternal idiot' printed backwards on my neck! No one thought to tell me, excepting Katherine of course, who had me twitching with misapprehension all day with her comment:_

 _'You needn't go to the trouble of reminding us, Miss Shirley, it's perfectly obvious.'_

 _What joy it brings me to know you know the exact expression on my face right now. I hope I have pictured yours correctly; one surprisingly sanguine about Roy's turning up in a letter to you._

 _I am going to be very bold now ~not in that way, haven't you noticed how stubby my pen nib is?~ and imagine the questions you want to ask about Roy. Not that you would. And I love you for your upright, old fashioned, blither than Blythe ways (so much so I believe I'll become one myself one fine September day.) But I wouldn't want some unspoken misunderstanding to grow between us, not when I could prevent it. So allow me tell you all about Mr Royal Gardner. And if you don't wish to know, as Charlie Sloane so wisely said, stop reading!_

 _Oh, this is going to be more difficult than I assumed. It will go some way to proving my discombobulation when I tell that it was really all down to algebra; where A was dependent upon B, which led to C, and D was the result. You see if you and I had still been friends I would have been cheering you on at football which is the last place I should have met Roy. Then again I could just as easily blame Tennyson. Roy heard my paper at the Philomathic and was suitably impressed enough to seek me out, so perhaps there really was no avoiding the fellow._

 _Ouch, how like Stella I sound! But that is due to wounded pride not to a wounded heart. You see I am not the only woman Roy has proposed to. Oh, he loved me in his own way and I tried to love him in mine. But it was a painting of love, a poem on a page. Admirable, beautiful, enviable... and flat. I missed the rough edges, the crossed out, smudgy, mixed up bits. Most of all I missed the substance. Something I could grab handfuls of, something to take shelter under, something that made my face ache with laughter and my heart ache with longing._

 _When I say something, Gilbert, I mean someone. And when I say someone I mean... you._

 _I suppose there is really only one thing you want to know, which is when did I begin to consider you as something more than a chum? It does credit to you, darling boy, that the one person so intricately bound up in that question is the only one to have never asked me. Diana, Rachel, Priss, Phil (she was the worst!) even Marilla in her round about way have all wondered. I wonder myself, because I gave them all a different answer. I wasn't intending to deceive them all, it just so happens that on different days I take a different path to you._

 _To Priss I invoked Elizabeth Bennet, and told her it was when you won the Cooper Prize that I changed my mind. You may lack the grounds of Pemberley, Gilbert Blythe, but your brilliance is every bit as captivating. To Phil I said it was coming to know the Reverend Jo that caused me to question my highfalutin ideals. Rachel still hasn't received a straight answer (though she will keep prodding.) Marilla decided it happened when you gave up the Avonlea school so that I could stay on at Green Gables ~though truth to tell that is the reason she loves you. And Diana? Diana declares I was in love with you all along! They are all true in their way. But then so are others, reasons, moments I can't bring myself to capture and pin down. Forgive me if I don't catalog them all as though we could be explained away in words. You will have your own ideas, I suspect. And shall I have mine._

 _But there is one day in particular, a not very promising day, one that I would have given anything to avoid, when I began to be aware that the mysterious, sensitive, inscrutable man I dreamed of might possibly live on Newbridge Rd at the Allwinds farmstead and not in some castle in the sky. (Or Alderley, Bolingbroke.)_

 _It was the day I went into your room._

 _No, not in your dreams ~or your fevered imaginings~ but at three o'clock on a Saturday afternoon, five days before Christmas. Your mother asked me to fetch a lamp because the sun was low and the clouds were thick and the sheets for the hospital were in danger of being stitched in a manner that would cause the Carmody Ladies Aid to howl gleefully. You can imagine how eager I was to do your mother's bidding, the talk at that time was all about some no count orphan snubbing Avonlea's most eligible bachelor. But as I went up the stairs ~and over the cats~ I wasn't brooding on my destination, I was simply relieved to get away. I think that's why seeing your room for the first time, smelling it, standing in it had such an unexpected impact upon me._

 _I can feel it go through me now, and it's a bittersweet sensation because it brings you to me. Truly Gil, I have such a sense of you at this moment and I miss you._

 _I miss you. I miss you. I miss you. I miss you. I miss you_

 _Later..._

 _Hello again, my sweet. I have since pulled myself away from your memory (and hauled myself off a certain blue doughnut cushion) to continue your letter. Perhaps you took supper as you waited. I am glad to know you're eating, gladder still to think of you rowing through mist and shine as the sun rises over the treetops. I am remembering those curious ducks that congregated on the small island that sits in the midst of the river. The garbled chuffs they made, their haughty waddles and beady expressions. It reminds me of the good women in our little village assembling by the church gate ~or in your front parlour basting sheets._

 _They were forgot, those women, the sounds they made seemed sucked from the air when I stepped inside your room. It was wonderfully silent and so fearfully neat. It would have had the feel of the preserved room of a fallen soldier if not for the way everything pulsed with your presence. I needn't go to the trouble of describing your own bedroom to you, but there is one thing I must mention. An extraordinary collection of treasures. Bones, stones, feathers, and sticks you had placed on the mantel of your fireplace with a careful carelessness that said more about the man, Gilbert Blythe, than any photograph or article. It sang of you, rang with you, and echoed throughout me as though I was a prairie and you were the wind._

 _I looked over the display and marvelled at the discovery that so much of you was still a mystery. We had known each other since I was eleven, we'd become so close you wanted to marry me, how could I have missed such qualities in you? The tender care you would have taken over those bird bones. The eye you had for the beauty in a shell, so small it should have lain on the shores till it was ground into sand instead of finding a home with you. Your tactile nature, the feathers and grasses that begged to be stroked over cheeks and lips. The soft dun colours so often overlooked, and rare shades of violet and teal. The improbable finds, and macabre ones, the intangible way it was all put together. It was a poem, the most beautiful poem I have ever seen. And it wasn't in a book or carefully copied out onto heart shaped cards. It would never win accolades, it wasn't meant to be seen at all._

 _I had this terrible sense of intrusion but I couldn't turn away. If it wasn't for the well timed leap of one of the Allwinds felines I might be standing there still. I was filled with unexpected and delicious fascination ~about one of my oldest chums in the world. That feeling I tried to cultivate with Roy, of passion and urgency, oh it bloomed then and refused to be ignored._

 _I reasoned I was being sentimental, that it was your companionship I missed. And that wasn't a lie, I missed it horribly. Still it bloomed, this voluptuous curiosity that had no place in remembered friendship, and then I did lie to myself. I pretended not to know what I knew. But what should I have done? Roy was in love with me and you were in love with Christine and whatever I had discovered I discovered too late._

 _Never again shall I make excuses to avoid a sewing circle!_

 _When I read what you wrote tonight, about the wind, and aloneness, and your small self tracing a finger over 5000 miles in an atlas, I thought of that poem you had placed on your shelf and I knew. It was no singular occurrence, the exception that proved the rule; that Gilbert Blythe is a frank and loyal fellow with oodles of ambition and a mischievous wit (and this is my revised list, you don't want to know what was featured pre 1880.) I am coming to realise he is a much stranger, more poetical, more unpredictable man than that. How else could he have fallen in love with someone like me?_

 _When you feel the wind, Gil, know I am thinking and dreaming of you._

 _from the Windiest Willows,_

 _Chinook-girl_

 _ **... ... ...**_

 ***Opening lines taken from Chapter three, Anne of Windy Willows (they are paraphrased here for ease of understanding)**

 ***Joke at Charlie's expense refers to a line in a letter he wrote in RD3 chapter XXII**

 ***Alderley is the name for Royal Gardner's family residence in the RD stories**

 ***Gilbert's room first mentioned in RD4 chapter XXXIV**


	5. Knowns and Unknowns

**V  
**

 **Harvey House, Redmond, K'port**

 **October 29th**

 _Dearest Girl,_

 _Where did you come from? Not which street or town, but which world? Gilbert Blythe has a poetic soul? Who am I, a mere medical student to argue with that. How much I love you. I know all too well how you are about silences but when I see you again at Christmas -the most anticipated Christmas since 1871, also known as Pocket Knife Christmas- let's be sure to continue this conversation._

 _I can imagine your face right now. There is a dent between your brows and you're looking sidelong into the distance as if to say 'The only way I can talk more, Mr Blythe is if you kiss less!' Duly noted. But in between the silence and kisses I hope we shall always talk.  
_

 _I laughed when I read about this poem I'd made. Not because it was never intended to be such a thing, though I can honestly say it wasn't. But because after years of blind hope and misguided effort all that was required to win you was a pile of sticks and bones! If I had but known- but enough. I don't regret one moment if in the end it brought us together. Even the orchard. Even Gardner. Consider all questions on that score well and truly answered, excepting one. Why did you wear my lilies yet not save a dance for the 'captivating' winner of the Cooper Prize?  
_

 _As to my room, what you were looking at was an ancient battle ground. One between mother and son. Those jars of birds eggs and shells were supposed to contain preserves, but I'd keep swiping them from the cellar and Mam would keep charging into my room to claim them back. I would have given up the habit long ago if she hadn't proved such a worthy foe. At one time I had over two dozen jars in my room, holding everything from chrysalises and seedlings to a dead garter snake. The latter was my own attempt at preserving and for six weeks it lasted fairly well. Then during the blackberry glut of '76 -remember, Anne? We all had purple fingers and tongues for weeks- Mam laid siege. The snake was dropped the moment she saw what it was. And the stench, it festered in my room for days. Any self respecting housewife would have known the trick to shifting it. But good Mrs Blythe maintained her ignorance._

 _Gradually I developed an eye for interesting, out of the ordinary things. That tiny shell you mentioned I found in a tree. The stripes on the bluejay feather appear to spell out 'little'. The clutch of duck eggs in creams, greens and blues all came from the same duck (Fred's dog killed the duck). The bird bones satisfied something different -though my grouse skull did have superior eye cavities. I spent hours getting them cleaned and then piecing them together. I wanted to learn the name of each bone, then I wanted to see if I could identify them by touch alone. Sometimes when I closed my eyes and ran a bone over my cheek or along my jaw I had better luck discerning it than I did with my fingers. The body is a curious thing._

 _They're all gone now, those finds of mine. Ada Corke took one look at my mantel piece and threw the lot in a crate. Mam considered this to be a sign of open war, declaring Ada had implied she was a bad housekeeper and more incredible still, that she had no right to throw away my belongings. This from the woman who had been trying to achieve the same thing for years. When the fever broke I remember Mam pointedly taking Ada's herbal brews off the mantel and replacing them with wildflowers. I must say I preferred looking at them to some old rocks. They reminded me of certain someone. (And when I say someone I mean you.)_

A mineral which contains a foreign mixture is placed under that species of which it has the most distinguishing character, unless it assumes the crystalline form of some other substance of which it contains a few parts percent.

 _Clearly the above does not belong here, but Dr Walsh was stalking behind me just as I began the next page so I thought it best write something that won't have me thrown out of class. Yes, I am writing to you in Chem class. Not because I am wanting to follow in the footsteps of The Fox and fail chemistry, or even because I am bored. (Though I am, Dr Walsh merely reads aloud from the set text as though they were his own well considered lecture notes.) But because I won't have the use of my room tonight as The Fox is entertaining Miss Swales. She has been put on nights at Imperial, and sleeps all the day, so the early evening is the only time they may meet. Baffling fellow, he could have his pick of shop girls or co-eds but he will chase after nurses._

 _You might wonder why he is so determined to flout every rule in the Redmond code of conduct, but then you haven't met The Fox. And he has yet to meet you. He is extremely keen, however. At first he wanted to know what sort of woman trusted a fellow to keep a three year engagement without her mama about to make him keep it. But after observing the effect your letters have on me he has become entirely fascinated. Nothing I tell him about you will satisfy; enemy, chum, competitor, co-conspirator, headmistress least of all._

 _Not who is she, Coop! -just as I feared my classmates have taken to calling me Cooper- What is she? What sort of miraculous being can bring a six foot, 160 pound-_

 _170! I say._

 _-vexingly handsome know-it-all to his knees every time the post is delivered? You'd rather sidle up to a yellow envelope than meet Do's sister, and suck on your pen thinking up what to write than come to the Saturday Club. What sort of spell has she cast on you? What sort of girl is she?_

 _I had to think about that, which pleased The Fox -he is always hoping to stump me- and four hours later when we walked back from a Pharm lab I still hadn't answered him. But I hardly mind taking my time because thinking up an answer means thinking of you._

 _I thought about the last time I saw you at Bright River station. When that unexpectedly large crowd gathered at the platform, and you said you didn't know what would scandalise them more, the sight of me kissing you on the mouth or the fact you had forgotten to wear a hat. I was glad you had. You'll say I'm teasing but when the train pulled away and everyone else became a blur I could still see your hair, and I knew you watched me till the last._

 _I thought about the first time I saw you. Actually I heard you first. You were chirping away with Diana as you cut through the Birch path to school. From the way you talked I assumed you had to be my age at least, but when I saw you I thought you couldn't have been more than nine. It seemed impossible to me that this little twig was the witch-child all Avonlea was gabbing about. I should have known you'd defy expectations. Mine most of all. I considered myself a cut above the usual farm boy and you lost no time showing me how stale my thinking had become._

 _I don't know what I was thinking of when I grabbed your braid like I did. Nothing much at all I'm afraid, except that this new girl had no right to find thin air more interesting than me. But you were right, whatever it was you saw was more important than the rooster sitting across from you. I wish it hadn't taken five years for you to forgive me, but I meant it about the slate, Anne. I fell under your spell the moment you clattered it over my head._

 _I could hardly say that to The Fox, however, and when we were coming in from rowing practice yesterday morning I still hadn't told him what kind of a girl you are. So then he starts in with these taunting questions, always in my ear, whether I'm making an incision in a rat's belly or distilling a sulphur solution._

 _Is she a country girl or a town girl? Rich or poor? Sweet tempered or foul tempered? Clever or dreamy? Is she prettier of face or of figure? Shy or a performer? Is she a reader by the hearth or a writer in the world? More beloved of boys or of girls? Does she climb trees or picnic beneath them? Is she loyal or unforgiving, sharp-tongued or purple prosed, beautiful or plain, maligned or beloved? From an established family or a mysterious new comer?_

 _How could I answer when you have been every single one; what words could I summon that might define such a woman?  
_

 _I've thought about it some more and I still don't know. It won't help matters that I am now writing this in the dining hall where the fellow at my elbow is attempting to discuss carious joints with me, and the one opposite is eating soup in a way that would out-slurp Sloane. Physiology is my last class of the day, the study of the function of living things. I haven't a hope of passing it when I can't even describe you._

 _ **October 30th**  
_

 _No sign of The Fox so I think I will lie in bed awhile. There is a heavy grey rain hitting my window, the sort only Kingsport can summon, and it hits the pane behind my head with a satisfying patter. Ah, if Pup saw me write that!_

 _'Rain will rain', he says. 'And what the wind brings the sea takes away.'_

 _It's an Old Country saying, from his mother's people on the far off isle of Harris, and it means that we live with Nature on her terms._

 _Cherishing the old ways, doing things the way they have always been done, that sort of man makes the very best farmer. But I am not that sort of man. My great-grandfather Blythe hailed from a long line of crofters in the highlands of Scotland. Either he was desperate or he possessed a pioneering spirit not seen in the Blythe line until yours truly emerged three generations later, but at eighteen he sailed with his bride to Canada when the century was new and so were his hopes. Allwinds was the sum of all his dreams, and he passed that dream on to his eldest son. The farm wasn't able to support two families so my grandfather paid for his brother to study medicine, and swore he would not take a wife until David was able to. He was years past forty when my father was born and died nineteen years later, leaving Pup the farm and the care of his mother, a younger brother, who now lives in New Brunswick, and a younger sister, who now lives in Charlottetown.  
_

 _You will have heard the talk about Marilla and my father. I know some things but they aren't for me to tell. It's nothing I can't imagine Pup telling you himself one day, and explains why he also took so long in marrying. The farm that runs by ours was the once the Macleod place, owned by my infamous grandmother and her two daughters, Jessie and Sarah. Jessie took George Fletcher for a husband. But my mother bided her time until my father cottoned on she was waiting for him._

 _They were supposed to have two sons as the eldest Blythe has always done. I should have been called John too, in honour of that same tradition. I came first, none came after and as if my mother knew I was born to break with the old ways she went and named me Gilbert. She was so ill after my birth she might have called me Pius the tenth and Pup wouldn't have raised an eyebrow. But in a land of Charlies and Roberts there were times when I wouldn't have minded being good plain John. I wanted to be like him. Not simply because I admired him but because I knew I would need his temperament to be the farmer I was supposed to be. There was no other son to do it. Still, there are worse fates._

 _We used to dread the winters, Pup would get breathless for weeks at a time, then it would come on in autumn and linger till early spring. His eyes took on that glassy look, and his face was always ruddy. You'll remember how Ruby was. But I'm sure you'll also remember the looks on the faces of her family; that thin smile, the always doing no matter how needless, no telling Ruby anything that might scare her. Our house was just like that and I promise you Anne when I become a doctor I refuse to do the same. When a fellow faces grim news I shall tell him so, not paint false futures or expect his family to deceive him._

 _Now I sound prickly. But sometimes I feel so vexed. It doesn't seem right that so much of medicine is focused upon how things have always been done, as though a sick man was the same as a sick piece of land and needed cow horn and silica to bring him back to health. At Redmond I expected to find great minds pushing the boundaries of knowledge, questioning everything. But they are so bound up in their own reputations, standing on the shoulders of giants in order to point out the view behind me, not the path ahead. Pup's consumption, it can't be that the only cure is to take yourself to arid lands and simply wait for the air to work upon you._

 _It was three years before he finally felt cured. The farm was remortgaged and anything that could be was sold off. Even then we couldn't afford for Mam to come with us. She would have been content to live in a covered wagon but Pup wouldn't hear of it. Alberta was a wild frontier, and respectable places were expensive and hard to secure. He was afraid of what might happen should he become too weak to protect her. There were some nights, Anne, during bootlegging raids in the township where I remember setting a chair by the door and a rifle on my knee._

 _Before we left Mam took me aside and said, 'I know I ought to prevent your going but can't I bring myself to do it. I am more glad than I should be knowing you chose to go with Pup instead of staying behind with me.'_

 _I always felt she was saying more than look after your father. She knew I was made to seek out unknowns -even if I didn't always understand them. Which is why, Anne Shirley, I still lack the words that might explain you._

 _What a nice excuse to lie back and think of you some more._

 _All love to you, sweet girl,_

 _Gilbert_

 _ **... ... ...**_

 *** chemistry quote from The Use of a Blowpipe in Chemical Analysis by J.J. Berzelius, 1822 (Yeah, I went there)**

 *** Harris Island is in the Outer Hebrides and the quote is theirs, not mine**

 *** Pius the ninth was the Catholic pope at the time and therefore not a popular name for a Presbyterian boy**

 *** I know L.M.M. would have had John Blythe go to Alberta for his health because many sanatoriums were established there by the late 1880s. In the early 1870s however the place was a very basic frontier -those bootlegging raids were real and extremely violent. (I recommend Rebecca the Historian's article on the historical discrepancies in the AoGG canon which argues that Montgomery's timeline is about twenty years out.) Geek out.**


	6. Rights and Wrongs

**VI  
**

 **Windy Willows, Spooks Lane, S'side**

 **November 10th**

 _...I got a postcard today from Davy with ten kisses crossed on it and a letter from Priscilla written on some paper that a 'friend' of hers in Japan sent her... silky thin paper with dim cherry blossoms on it like ghosts. I'm beginning to have my suspicions about that friend of hers. But your big fat letter was the purple gift the day gave me. I read it four times over to get every bit of its savour... like a dog polishing off a plate! That certainly isn't a romantic simile, but it's the one that popped into my head. Still, letters, even the nicest, aren't satisfactory. I want to see you. I'm glad it's only five weeks to Christmas holidays. And happily I have found something besides seething over Pringles to keep me occupied till then.  
_

 _You have furnished the dim garret of my imagination with such bright ideas. I have begun to write again! It was your wind that did it, that and the canny way you have of writing letters that tell all and reveal nothing. Is it a characteristic of all men, I wonder, or do Blythes alone possess the gift of relaying such fabulous tales in a way that leaves me with more questions than answers?_

 _Who was the young bride you speak of, for instance? You say your great grandfather exhibited such pioneering spirit, but what of the girl who sailed away with him? Can you imagine Marilla allowing me to take up with a boy and leave my homeland forever? At eighteen? I dreaded four years in Kingsport, let alone a lifetime on the other side of the world. Remember when we stood on the deck as the ferry carried us off to our futures? I wanted to howl ~perhaps I did blub just the tiniest bit~ but I was determined you shouldn't see me fall to pieces, not when we had talked and planned and dreamed of that moment for so long. The promise of one day attending the hallowed halls of Redmond bore us over many a mountain of class work. And the parents! Long before these demands for more dis- cip-line at Summerside there was Mrs Donn-ell and her precious St Clair!  
_

 _It made me smile to know you wanted a simple name while I always wished for a dazzling one. Could you still love me if I were Cordelia called? Or Geraldine? Or Violetta? I was enraptured by Diana's name. It astonished me that the Barrys were allowed to call their daughter after a pagan goddess. After all Avonlea has just as many Janes and Ems as it does Roberts and Andrews. Though no other Annes! Isn't that curious? Unless you count Annie Lewis, and you had better not. While you are making promises to me, Gilbert, swear the name Annie will never pass your lips. Ruinous, orange haired, freckle faced name! Stop laughing, it is! And I shall never answer to it!_

 _I hope I don't now discover that your doughty great grandmother was an Annie ~are there any redheads in your family that you know of? Well, whatever she was called I have imagined her Iona (I believe I have just mixed my Inner and Outer Hebridean Islands, but never mind.) Isn't it the perfect name for such a girl? I envisage her standing upon a heathery slope, her tangled hair whipping at her cheeks, her eyes staunch and tearless as she bids farewell to that little piece of earth forever. Her John must have been very much in love with her. Why else would he have called their farm Allwinds, in honour of those words~_

 _What the wind brings the sea takes away..._

 _Doesn't it give you goosebumps to think of it? He would have meant that name to bring fortune and happiness to his bravehearted wife. I hope she was happy, Gil, so far from home and from any chance of returning to it. Being an Island girl herself she must have felt a deep affinity for our Island. Oh, I hope it was Spring when they arrived in Avonlea, when blossoms are heavy and clouds are wild. That or the spiced delights of Autumn. I have always been especially fond of Octobers but I love them so completely now I think that you are borne of them. I imagine your father holding you in his arms, revealing you to the world and the world to you. Your eyes in undecided colours looking not upon your mother's face, but at trees strung with coppery, papery leaves, the sky stitched with the arrows of departing birds, and John Blythe staring down at you. Fearing for his wife and tasting your brand new name in his mouth._

 _Gilbert._

 _What would all those Johns have said? You know I was very taken with the idea of your grandfather refusing to marry until his brother could. Was it really forsworn from brotherly sentiment or because in truth he was in no great hurry to make a match? Perhaps there was a woman in his past who broke his heart..._

 _~Gilbert I am blushing as I write this but I am amazed at your knowing of Marilla and John. Of course it all happened so long ago, but still~_

 _...What if this woman regretted her words and then heard this John would never take a bride until David did? There are the bones of a fascinating story! But what intrigued me most was hearing about the Macleod women running their own farm. What valiant, capable women they sound. How many stories have been lost or forgotten, of women who dared to live lives every bit as great as their menfolk yet were cast throughout history simply as wife. Would you mind, belovedest, if I took inspiration from your past to build one anew? I cannot let go of Iona. She has been breathed into me just as surely as your wind and I long to set her story free._

 _Now to our story..._

 _I am blushing again ~I think perhaps I never stopped~ as I recall Convocation. How easy to ascribe feelings and motives to people I have never met, yet how impossible to account for my own. I even read over an old diary entry that relays that evening especially and I still don't know what to tell you. You say you are at a loss to describe me. Imagine being me! I believe the closest I ever got to explaining myself was when Phil accused me of capriciousness for refusing Roy. She said I didn't know my own mind. How that smarted because I do know my own mind. The trouble is, as I explained to Phil, that my mind changes and then I have to get acquainted with it all over again._

 _I had only just begun to make space for the notion that there were things about you I might never know (and maintain all you like your poem wasn't a poem, Gilbert Blythe, I know what I saw, a villanelle could not have been constructed more carefully) while my heart began to beat ever stronger with a terrible warning: Something's gone wrong, Something's gone wrong... What you wrote in your previous letter, when you heard I was to take the Carmody school and how wrong it was, well that's precisely how I felt. The problem was I didn't exactly know which wrong thing needed my attention, much less how to right it._

 _It was wrong that we were leaving Kingsport as strangers when it was your encouragement and dedication that kept my Redmond hopes alive. No one else, not Marilla nor Diana, could have understood what it meant to me. But you did, because you wanted it too. And I wanted it for you, Gil. I admired your sense of duty but I always thought you'd make a better doctor than a farmer. When we sat there on the kitchen steps and you told me you had decided to pursue medicine, tell me, dearest boy, was that before or after you announced your decision at Allwinds? Whenever I recall that day I can hear your voice and it's filled with nervous pride, as if you finally dared to speak your dream aloud. Practicing, if you will, for the moment you would tell your father he would not be passing his dream onto you._

 _Something of our dream seemed tarnished, WRONG, when I thought of graduating without your hand in mine. I suppose your lilies were the next best thing, but in truth I didn't pin them to my waist in fond remembrance of a dearly missed chum. My heart was beating too fiercely for that. When all the talk was of my upcoming engagement to Roy I felt no more excitement than I did at the thought of an extra hours daylight or another week of summer. Perfectly nice but neither wanted nor unwanted. Yet whenever there was the merest mention of you; a note from you, a gift from you, even the sight of you, I thought the buttons on my shirtwaist must surely give out. It was a violent sensation, not in the least way pleasant. Only in negligible, negligent moments when I gave into memory did I feel all was right with the world. I don't have the right pen with me now, but when I do I shall tell you about the hours I spent in my beloved copper bath, perhaps that will explain it best of all._

 _That evening before the dance I fastened your necklace around my neck with the flutteriest hand and the dreamiest smile. What I hoped might happen I hadn't considered. I only knew I was becoming acquainted with a new Anne and didn't quite know what to expect of her. I walked toward you and with every step my heart beat with an abiding This is right, This is right, This is right... Then Phil told me about your engagement and it was as if that heart was ripped from my breast. Wrong didn't begin to describe it, because EVERYTHING was wrong. It was wrong of you to leave me to find out in such a way. It was wrong that you were in love with Christine. It was wrong that I treated Roy so thoughtlessly, and SO wrong to think of you the way that I had. However cruel I seemed, please know I turned that cruelty upon myself with unsparing viciousness. That was the reason I stayed, dancing every dance, smiling all night; to punish myself for being so WRONG. I wanted to flee. I could never have danced with you, I would have mangled the Two Step by the second step._

 _When you came to Patty's Place the next day I was certain you were about to tell me your news. I couldn't bear to hear it, let alone get the word congratulations out of my mouth. I felt humiliated but also furious, and while I had never hidden those feelings from you before, that aspect of our friendship seemed permanently closed to me now that you had promised yourself to someone else._

 _Even when you recovered from the fever I was unsure if we could recover that part us, the part that was honest and forthright. But how many times have I relived those moments. Where I do say yes when you ask me to dance. When I do go down the stairs of Patty's Place to talk to you (A question for you now, what were you doing there?) When I do rush to your sickbed and kneel at your side. When I do find the words to say I'm in love with you, Gilbert, and I want to be your wife..._

 _Then again, that wouldn't make for half so interesting a story!_

 ** _… … …_**

 **Harvey House, Redmond, K'port**

 **November 14th**

 _Dear Miss Shirley,_

 _Please find enclosed one gross pen nibs, neither scratchy, stubby or sharp._

 _Respectfully, G. J. Blythe_

 _P.S. ABOUT THOSE HOURS YOU SPENT IN YOUR BELOVED COPPER BATH..._

 _... ... ..._

 ** _* first paragraph from the end of Anne's letter to Gilbert in chapter 4, Anne of Windy Willows_**

 ** _* a villanelle is a poem constructed within extremely complex metre and rhyme rules_**

 _ *** references to copper baths and Gilbert's turning up at Patty's Place are mentioned in RD4 chapter XXXVI**  
_


	7. Ups and Downs

**This chapter covers one of the most iconic events in AoWW, the Mary Queen of Scots play and Jen Pringle's subsequent revenge. As such I needed to quote far more of Anne's original letters than I usually do. I hope it flows alright.**

 **VII  
**

 **Windy Willows, Spooks Lane, S'side**

 **21st November**

 _Ho ho, Mr G.J. Blythe,_

 _Thank you for your generous gift. Please know I intend to hide them all away from the nib-spoiling Rebecca Dew and put them to very good use. As to the aforementioned copper bath... well it was four foot long, three feet at one end, two at the other, and superbly comfortable. Whatever else you might wish to know I believe I will withhold until Christmas morning. Now there will be a gift you won't dare to open in front of your folks._

 _I'm sorry, Gil, but hot drowsy remembrances are beyond me today. The sweet victory I tasted at the play's success is now ashes in my mouth. Jen Pringle has taken her revenge and written a scathing piece about me in Important Notes. My name, of course, is never mentioned, instead the entire school community is gorging itself upon a piece that features a pointy chinned, moon-eyed schoolmarm. As you attempt to summon words that might describe the woman you betrothed yourself to, please note I am also known as an 'upstart foundling', a 'spatter-faced virago', a 'baking powder hawker', and a 'talentless hack!' She was clever enough to avoid any reference to red hair, but it must have been tempting. This put me in the humiliating position of either ignoring her piece in the school paper or demanding an apology. But why would I do that unless I recognised the poor unfortunate so ruthlessly described? There was nothing for it but take another the kick to my pride and send the spiteful minx home. Naturally, the Pringles have summoned the school board, with talk of Miss Shirley's being made to resign top of their agenda. Oh, what am I to do! I feel so dispirited and hopeless I believe a stroll to the old graveyard may actually cheer me._

 _Later..._

 _I wended my way to the graveyard this evening. I think wend your way is a lovely phrase and I work it in whenever I can. It sounds funny to say I strolled in the graveyard but I really did. Comedy and tragedy are so mixed up in life, Gilbert. The only thing that haunts me is that tale of the two who lived together for fifty years and hated each other all that time. I can't believe they really did. Somebody said that hate is only love that missed its way. I feel sure that under their hatred they loved each other... just as I really loved you all those years I thought I hated you... and I think death would show it to them. I'm glad I found out in life. And I have found out there are some decent Pringles... dead ones._

 _ **… … …**_

 **Harvey House, Redmond, K'port**

 **November 27th**

 _My dear Spatter-faced Virago,_

 _I'm glad I made you laugh. You needn't go to the trouble of providing further details about that bath (unless you insist). The image of you lying in one was quite enough for this boy. As you say, though letters are nice they aren't satisfactory. I want to see you, too._

 _I hope to hear the school board have seen sense but I won't hold my breath. How many times was I pulled up in front of the board at White Sands? Four, five times at least. We can always hope a plague particular to Pringles will wipe out the lot of them. Failing that there is always the possibility Jen is made to apologise. Yes, that is a ridiculous hope, but I've always had a fondness for impossibilities (though right now a plague seems more likely.)_

 _I wish I could be there with you, I hate to think of you facing the foe alone. But I'm glad you want to share your trials. You can tell me anything, Anne, I hope you know that._

 _Why don't you start with this Iona, how does she fare in the vast seas of your imagination? I wish I could tell you the woman who inspired her was called Annie, but she had a more peculiar name. I don't remember how to pronounce it, if memory serves it sounded like groan and was spelled like grain. That can't be right, can it? I'll be sure to ask Pup when I see him. Which reminds me, are you to come to Christine's? I can't hold off my reply much longer, and Phil has said you may stay with her on Patterson Street._

 _I've warned her not to needle you about the college in Bolingbroke. After your dealings with perfidious Pringles (her word not mine) she is even more perplexed at your determination (my word, hers was far more impolite) to remain at Summerside. You won't hear me having an opinion one way or the other -and that I can say is a definite Blythe trait. It would be something else to have you close but I know you've set your heart on winning over that town, and keeping watch over Little Elizabeth. You know, even though you've described the child down to the last golden strand on her head, whenever I read of her all I can picture is a red haired, grey eyed waif._

 _I'll have to continue this tomorrow. The Fox is kicking around my room doing his best to annoy me. There's been a cold snap in Kingsport, the river has frozen which means no more crew until the thaw. He's like a great big hound, shambling about the place, eyes staring mournfully at the door hoping someone will take him for a walk. Tonight there's to be a talk in the Great Hall by a fellow from Guinea about tropical diseases. Not much chance of them here, it really is freezing, but there are worse ways to spend an evening. The best, of course, are those spent with the steadfast, bravehearted principal of Summerside High. Now there is a heroine._

 _I miss my girl, and if my heart ever spoke to me like yours does to you I suspect I would hear it say-_

 _Three weeks to Christmas, Three weeks to Christmas, Three weeks to Christmas..._

 _ **… … …**_

 **Windy Willows, Spooks Corner, S'side**

 **December 15th**

 _…I can see over Summerside from the left window of the tower. Just now it is a huddle of friendly white roofs... friendly at last since the Pringles are my friends. Here and there a light is gleaming in gable and dormer. Here and there is a suggestion of grey-ghost smoke. Thick stars are low over it all. It is a 'dreaming town'. Isn't that a lovely phrase? You remember... 'Galahad through dreaming towns did go?'_

 _Those concerts were rather magical, weren't they? It strikes me how much Miss Stacey has influenced my teaching. One can't always be striving and serious ~though Katherine would say otherwise~ every child needs a glowing little epoch to look forward to. Diana avows you pocketed one of my tissue-paper roses at the Christmas concert of '75. I never believed her. That is to say I never believed you capable of such a romantic gesture. Now I wonder if Diana was right, and that somewhere in that room of yours lurks a faded paper rose. I remember Prissy Andrews had real carnations in her hair ~from Mr Phillips no less! And I premiered my beloved brown gloria, whose perfect puffed sleeves kept my nerve puffed too, as I stood before friend and foe and delivered my first recital._

 _Have I told you they are creating a Drama Society at Summerside? Not content with pulling me along to every soiree and jamboree (since the miraculous discovery of cannibals in a certain family tree) the Pringles are conjuring up another grand event to raise funds for a wardrobe worthy of their offspring. Our Mary Queen of Scots was certainly a spare affair, though none the worse for it, I think. There is a lot to be said for spareness, it fires the imagination if nothing else._

 _I feel so happy, Gilbert. I won't have to go home to Green Gables at Christmas defeated and discredited. I began to wonder if I would ever feel like dancing again. Now feel I could fly over the Strait and into your arms. But I have that eight hour train journey to get through first, so don't you dare think of meeting me at the station. I won't have your first glimpse of me a bedraggled, limp looking one. Phil will meet me, and I shall meet you not a minute later than 7pm on the wobbly step of Patterson Street. Where I shall be wearing your favourite dress and a pale rose in my hair. And you shall take me on a rambling walk to the Rutherford Hotel ~the ramblier the better!_

 _ **… … …**_

 **P.E.I. Ferry Co. Port Wood P.E.I.**

 **7am December 20th 1887**

 **From: Miss A. Shirley**

 **To: Mr G. Blythe c/o Rev. J. Blake**

 **13 Patterson Street Old Town N.S.**

Disaster. Strait iced up. Ferry cannot pass. Iceboats full. Going home. Anne.

 _ **... ... ...**_

 **North Street Station. N.S.**

 **5am December 23rd 1887**

 **From: Mr G. Blythe**

 **To: Mr J. Blythe**

 **Allwinds Newbridge Road Avonlea P.E.I.**

Ice on line. Train derailed. Am fine. Returned to K'port. Tell Anne. Gilbert.

 _ **… … …**_

 **Hope & Anchor Inn, Caribou, N.S.**

 **December 30th**

 _Dear Anne,_

 _I've returned yet again to my hotel at a loss for what to do. The Iceboats can't go out because there are large stretches of slurry along the Strait, and the Ferry cannot leave because the ports are frozen. I don't want to spend another night here but I don't want to return to Kingsport either. If I do I must resign myself to spending the rest of Christmas at Redmond. I can't justify a third attempt, round trips and hotels are taking a toll on this poor scholar's pocket._

 _Your telegram didn't arrive at Patterson Street until long after ten. I spent most of the night at the station waiting for you. When Jo turned up with your message I think I read it a dozen times before it sunk in. Needless to say I never made it to Christine's engagement party. You would have loved it. I read in the society pages they hired the N.S. chamber ensemble and soprano, Irene Day._

 _I don't know why I am telling you this, I don't care about that party and I know you don't either. I want to see you so much I can't think of anything else. I keep picturing you on that wobbly step in your green silk dress and a rose in your hair. I did swipe that paper rose at the Christmas concert, Diana had it right. But you won't find it now. After you refused to forgive me that day at the pond I went straight home and shredded it. I don't regret it, you were mighty hard on a boy. But I believe you when you say you can be even harder on yourself._

 _When I walked away from you at the Convocation dance I felt sixteen again, I really thought I would dissolve into the parquet floor. I told myself -how many times have I told myself- that was it, no more! Then the very next day I heard Christine tell me she and I were supposedly engaged and all I could think of was you. That's why I went back to Patty's Place, because I thought perhaps you'd heard about it. If that was true you didn't seem happy, and I asked myself why. Why would Anne Shirley not like the idea of me marrying someone else? You can guess my conclusion. I was clinging to nothing even as I told myself what a Sloane sized fool I was._

 _When Phil announced your engagement all I felt was exhaustion. So bone tired I could have curled up on the porch at Patty's Place and slept for a month. I didn't realise how the chance of you had propped me up for so long, and then just like that Phil kicked my dream out from under me. I wanted to sleep for a hundred years._

 _I don't know why I'm telling you this either. I am so worn down right now, the thought of not seeing you till June lays me low. No one can tell me when this letter might reach you, there's talk of sending the mail via another port a hundred miles away. It might be weeks until you get this, but as soon as you do please write to me. I'm going to go back to Redmond, I've decided now, at least that way you'll know where to send your reply._

 _Make each page drip with you. I want to touch you, taste you, in each word you write. Maybe then I won't miss you so much._

 _Gil_

 _ **... ... ...**_

 **Green Gables, Avonlea. P.E.I.**

 **December 30th**

 _Dear Gil,_

 _Where are you? I'm not sure where to send this or when you might receive it. If you are reading this now it's because you've seen sense and gone back to Redmond, though knowing you I'm certain you will have spent more time than you should have at Caribou trying to get a berth on a some sort of vessel. If so, I hope with all my heart you've given up the enterprise, there has been a dreadful incident on the strait. In a bid to get home a man from Kensington took a sleigh across what he assumed to be solid ice. He lost his horse in a slurry and was found a day later on a narrow peninsula miles off course. Oh Gil, they had to cut the branch he was clinging to because his hands had frozen to it._

 _I can't imagine you without your hands anymore than I can imagine you without your golden brown eyes. When you cradle my face with your palms and brush your thumbs over my brows, I feel blessed somehow, wiped clean, made new. What is one missed Christmas to Gilbert Blythe's beautiful, expressive hands? No, you must stay where you are (which I am hoping is Redmond) put those hands to good use and write. Make it a letter you hardly dare send. You have an uncanny ability for reflecting my desires back to me, I long to know some of your own._

 _Tell me a secret, Gilbert. Dazzle me with your candour. Make me breathless and replete, and this a Christmas I shall always remember._

 _I miss you, please stay safe for me._

 _Anne_

 **... ... ...**

 *** third paragraph of Anne's first letter, first paragraph and first line in fourth paragraph of Anne's second letter taken directly from chapter 5, Anne of Windy Willows**

 *** incidentally and for no particular reason at all Gilbert's great grandmother was named Grainne (pronounced Graunya)**

 *** about Iceboats. From the early 1800s until the end of the first world war P.E.I. was dependent on Iceboats to get their mail and themselves across the Northumberland Strait to mainland Canada each winter. They were small, light, open-air vessels with runners to glide over ice. The danger occurred in soft slurries where passengers could become trapped or forced off course. Of course, those sturdy Island types were like, whatevs... and usually made daily crossings by the end of the 19th century. (Just not the Christmas of '87 ;o)  
**


	8. Burning and Fearless

**VIII  
**

 **Harvey House, Redmond, K'port**

 **January 20th, 1888**

 _Dearest most beloved girl,_

 _It's Sunday and as bittersweet as always. Every other hour (except the nights, they've always been yours) demands something of me. But on Sunday I forget my coursework and my responsibilities and spend the day with you._

 _I picture you at the door of the chapel. You're wearing your black woollen Tam, it falls over your brow and I want to tilt it back so the world can see your face. Instead I shove my hands in my pockets. I walk up the aisle, making sure to chose a pew one back from your own so I can steal a look at your neck. I lose track of what an Elder is saying because I've been studying whirls of hair at your nape, that one lone curl which falls onto your collar. I want to reach across and tuck it under your hat. Then I remember.  
_

 _I stroll around the snow-topped stones of Old St John's. Think of us rambling over the parkland, searching for heather, reading the clouds. I wonder if there is something I will say that will cause you to touch me. A nudge, an elbow, my hat pulled over my head, sends such a jolt straight through me that hours later I can still feel you. I want so much to feel you again. Then I remember.  
_

 _In the evening I stroll down Spofford Avenue. I can hear your laugh as you debate some point with Priss and Stella. There's a click of a gate latch, the sound of steps on a path, a latch-key scraping a lock. I cross the street and head toward the park, then peer over my shoulder. I'm wary to do so but I do it anyway, because catching you looking back at me is too hoped for a thing to forgo. I stand there waiting to see if you will send a glance my way. Then I remember.  
_

 _At night I'm sometimes so full of you I wish I could think of something else. I conjugate verbs, conceive ever more complicated calculations, recite the names of bones, muscles, arteries. They all carry me back to you. I'm thinking about you without knowing I am, in the same way my heart beats or my lungs expel air. Giving you up would be like living the rest of my life on my knees. Then I remember._

 _On Monday I drag myself out of bed and recall how endless that day used to be when I lived in White Sands. I'd walk you home each Sunday evening when I should have left hours earlier, always trying to stretch out our time together for as long as you would let me. We were at the gate of Green Gables one night when you said-_

 _'Can you feel it? There it is again, Monday tapping us on the shoulder. It should make tonight all the sweeter, instead all I can think of how I much I want to hold back tomorrow.'_

 _I know you're talking about the geometry assignments you have to set, the thought of Anthony Pye causing another mutiny -or Mrs Donnell, and I do my best to make you laugh because I need a laugh myself. I won't see you again till Friday, maybe I won't see you at all. I want to ask if I can but I don't. You'll just give me that look and then make sure we never meet. Yet somehow every Sunday we end up at the gate again.  
_

 _Tuesday, and it's so cold here there's ice inside my window. I think about the games we played on the fogged up glass on the ferry, and one night in particular when we shared a carriage with Diana and Fred. The four of us were crammed into the back seat and the small window behind us began to steam up. You were uncomfortably aware of the silence between my best friend and yours, so you scooped yourself up on your knees and marked out a game of naughts and crosses on the glass. Anagrams were next. You wanted to know what words I could make from this song, that name. After each game you leaned up close to the window and breathed all over it. All that huffing made your breast swell and your cheeks pink. Your hip pressed hard against my arm. You thought I let you win but I couldn't have spelled my own name in that moment. That night I didn't sleep at all._

 _On Wednesday I came in after Pharm lab to find a mess of logs all over the rug in my room. Provoked by the scant amount of wood we are supplied The Fox has taken matters into his own hands and had a half cord delivered up three flights of stairs. He seems to think the middle of the floor is a perfectly reasonable place to store them, but I kick him out of his armchair and show him how to stack it. We are soon so hot we're down to our shirtsleeves, then out comes a bottle of homemade akvavit and we're down to our vests. The fire is blazing, the room is the warmest it's ever been, and he starts up again on his favourite subject- Exactly what sort of woman I've engaged myself to? I'm not as discreet as I should be. I tell him how it took me more than ten years to win you. That it wasn't until I let you go and almost died that you finally knew you loved me. He likes you even more now._

 _Thursday is Anatomy class. It's not what you think, we're studying the structure of the eye. The cillary body, the posterior chamber, Canal of Schlemm, sclera, ora serrata, iris... and there you are. I think of your grey eyes. I want to say they are beautiful but they're not, they are burning and fearless. Sometimes I can feel them on me and I drop my pen, trip over my boot as I climb the stairs to my room. I think of us sharing a room when we are wed. Some nights I am sure I will pop every button on my shirt in my haste to get to you. Other nights I imagine it's your fingers loosening my tie and pulling my suspenders from my shoulders. I climb into bed and open the window. The Fox grumbles as he always does, but I ignore him and let cold gusts pour into the room and all over me. I lie there on top of my coverlet for as long as I can stand it, or until The Fox stomps over and slams the window shut._

 _On Friday I am always hungry. We had two hours of dissection this morning and I never want to eat anything until that part of the day is over. It's twelve before I take my first meal. I wander into the dining room and there's a girl about your height, with reddish hair in a braid down her back walking between two tables. I know it can't be you but my stomach drops to the floor just the same. I think about how good it would be to see you sitting opposite me now, instead of some fellow dripping gravy on his pathology notes, and his beard -he must be a second year. I can see you wrinkling up your nose at the puddings and taking a piece of bread and jam. The last time you did that you said to me-_

 _'When we get home, Gil, I'm going to eat two helpings of every dessert Marilla dreams up.'_

 _I said, 'I think Davy might give you some competition there.'_

 _'What is it with boys and their enormous appetites?' you asked me. 'Davy's half my size yet he eats twice as much.'_

 _How could I explain to you that there are some days I could devour you whole? Starting with that smear of butter on your chin. I pinched my lips together as if I was in danger of doing just that, and the next thing I knew you were cramming a crust into my mouth. I never tasted the bread, all I noticed was the merest tip of your finger pass between my lips. I couldn't eat a thing after that._

 _Saturday is the hardest day. I stand at the tram-stop on the way back from the clinic and then I remember I have nothing to rush home for. So I walk. It's so cold, the coldest winter in Kingsport I have ever experienced. I consider wandering over to Patterson street and making a nuisance of myself. I think about dragging Priss to a talk at the Philomathic, or playing snooker with my chums in the Common Room. As usual I end up in my room._

 _Tonight I was kicked out earlier than usual because Miss Swales was due to start work at five. I returned just after 4:30, changed out of my suit and into a sweater and a pair of crumpled trousers, and was stoking the fire when I heard them. The Fox and Dorelia snickering under the quilt on the floor beside his bed. I froze inside, not knowing if I should flee or even if I could. I made it out eventually, I went to the quad without my coat and left telltale signs of wanton destruction all over the snow covered grass. I started to run, past the rotunda, past the boat sheds, and on to the harbour. I felt aching and mortified. I should have been outraged, I should have protected Miss Swales' honour. Instead I was envious. Because I love you and I can't even see you, whereas Ed hasn't the slightest intention of marrying the girl in his arms and yet there they were, giving themselves to each other._

 _You asked me to be candid and I met your demand. It's not much of a secret but I never thought I might say it in so unadorned a way. I want you, Anne. I want you sitting across from me at chapel and at dinner. I want you instead of a fire, instead of the wind. I want to wake up in the morning not holding onto the memory of you, but holding onto you. And when I go to sleep I don't want to be lost in my dreams but to finally live them. I am so haunted by you right now I don't know where memory stops and reality starts._

 _Is this what you hoped I would write? I can't imagine anyone but you could bear to read such a letter. Even then I think it would have been wiser to copy out a poem. I'm not at all poetical, Anne. I'm not. I want you. With all of me. Not only the purehearted, scrupulous parts of myself. But wholly, bodily, and at this moment frantically._

 _I will send this now before I change my mind._

 _G.J.B._

 _ **... ... ...** _

**Harvey House, Redmond, K'port**

 **January 21st**

 _Anne, I'm sorry. I never should have sent that letter. It wasn't what I wanted to say. I miss you, that's all. We had one small week together after so many years apart. I just wanted another week._

 _I can't explain how I feel right now. I'm alive, I can study all the hours that I want, and you love me. It should be too much and I'm ashamed to admit there are times when it's not enough. I want more. I think you'll know by now exactly what that more entails and I'm afraid that I've shocked you, that when I see you next -whenever that may be- you'll be wary of me, anxious I'll lose control of my impulses. I could curse myself for sending that letter._

 _I am haunted, it's true, not with a memory but a promise of things to come. I'm building a future for us, Anne, and I won't let it go anymore than I'll let go of you. You know I can be an idiot but you also know I've never once lied. I mean this, Anne, I'm sorry for what I wrote. I gave into weakness and I hope you can forgive me -just please don't take another five years._

 _I won't implore you to write back. I'll wait, I'm good at it._

 _Gilbert_

 _ **... ... ...** _

**_* a cord is a unit of measurement measuring around 125 cubic metres._**

 ** _* akvavit is a Danish spirit, usually flavoured with herbs_**

 ** _* iris... is a reference to an anagram that Gilbert made from the words, I love Anne Shirley, first mentioned in RD1 chapter II_**

 ** _* the bread scene was inspired by Vickyp16's strawberry scene in a Summer at Green Gables_**


	9. Spilt Milk and Fallen Apples

**For the definitive account of Anne and Gilbert's last week together see Bertha Willis' One Week. Again I find myself writing in her shadow but I always wanted to give it a go, so this is my version :o)**

 **IX**

 **Windy Willows, Spook's Lane, S'side**

 **February 14th**

Letter the first

 _My dearest love,_

 _Your letter made me feel like the most beloved woman in all the world. That you regret writing it seems impossible to me. Please don't imagine my longing is any less than yours, if anything it's stronger because it has so much catching up to do! If only you knew how deeply that river flows through me, Gilbert. I was certain my letters had hinted as much, and I'm not one bit ashamed ~except perhaps for the spelling mistakes. But I can hardly take responsibility for those when all I can think of is you._

 _That week you described to me is now one of my greatest treasures. Hunting for heather, stacking up wood, lying under your open window... I was with you, Gil, I swear that I was, living each day by your side. You made our years at Redmond come alive for me again, and your days there now as familiar to me as my own. What bliss to know you have Anatomy on Thursdays, and can never take breakfast until after Dissection class. What joy to think of you recalling my one unruly curl as you listen to the sermon. You seem to know that the smallest details of your life mean everything to me. All of it. Even your moment of envy ~and your unexpected (and unexpectedly simmering) impatience._

 _To know that Gilbert Blythe, so equable, so upright and so very, very good is overwhelmed with love for me! I want to clamber to the top of my tower and sing it to the silvery rooftops.' Good day, Rebecca Dew', I shall call down to her, 'Did you know that the man I am betrothed to ran five miles in three feet of snow because he misses me so much?' 'Well met, Miss Brooke, have I mentioned that the winner of the Cooper Prize was so pent up with desire for yours truly he forgot how to spell his own name?'_

 _I imagine trying to maintain the same presence of mind that you did for all those years, and I know I would never last a month. Those two weeks we spent together before you spoke again were lived in agony and bliss. Oh to be loved by you, Gilbert, it is as astonishing as it is miraculous!_

 _I was about to send you the letter you asked for, the stickiest, drippiest one I could write! But after reading your words I know my response is no longer enough. I kept thinking on your simple wish for one more week, and found myself chasing it down in hopes of catching it for you. What I have written is merely what I managed to capture. But I offer it now that you might have a chance to live it again, just as I have lived those days of yours, over and over with you._

Letter the second

 _I remember that Friday perfectly because every single morning since I awake to my joy anew~ Gilbert lives and he loves me and I'm going to be his wife! (You see why I am prone to forgetting that footstool and tumbling out of bed.) We decided you should come to Green Gables as early as you dared. I could have only slept an hour or two but I kicked off my quilt with the anticipation and wonder of the princess who slept for a hundred years. I stood at my window and there you were, slouching on the stump where the Snow Queen once grew. Any fears of the previous evening being nothing more than a dream vanished with the last glow of the moon. It was real, it was true, you loved me as I loved you! And today we would share our joy with those we held most dear._

 _I admit there was a part of me that wished we could hold onto what we knew and keep it for ourselves. I began to understand the faraway look Diana would get when she and Fred were courting. To be in love and to be loved back is to live in a secret Eden, and I wished we'd been given more time to idle in our paradise. Then I heard your voice, you were talking with Davy on his way to milking~_

 _'But whatcha doin' here in your Sunday best on a Friday morning,' he demanded, 'I want to know?'_

 _Just think if it had been Rachel who had seen you first? She would have insisted I marry you that very day to atone for the sin of being seen in my nightclothes! Could you see me, Gilbert? When I think about that morning I regret the loss of the Snow Queen even more ~you're rather fond of climbing trees aren't you?_

 _I expected to find you in the garden, imagine my surprise to see you eating your eggs like a good little boy at our kitchen table. This was hardly the way I'd envisaged us making our announcement, with Davy rushing through the back door slopping milk all over the floor._

 _'I don' want to miss it! I don' want to miss why Gilbert Blythe is here!'_

 _Any other morning he would have been made to clean up his mess. Instead every eye was turned upon me; yours, Marilla's, Rachel's, Dora's, Martin's, Davy's were like saucers, waiting to hear what I had to say. I stood there like a blushing fool staring at the spilt milk, when like an angel you said~_

 _'I asked Anne to marry me, Davy boy? What do you think to that?'_

 _'Did Anne say yes?' he asked you. Impudent pup! I discovered my own voice then._

 _'Yes, I did', I said. Well that's what I intended to say but suddenly I was crying again. Marilla and Rachel offered their arms, Dora was shaking your hand, and Davy exclaimed~_

 _'Don't cry, Anne, you don't have to marry him if you don't want to. A fellow can't force a girl, you know. Stella Fletcher says so!'_

 _I wanted to floor to swallow me whole and you started laughing._

 _'Have you ever known Anne to do one thing she didn't want to do?'_

 _Davy considered this for a moment. 'Nope', he said, and shoved his handkerchief under my nose. 'Reckon you do want to marry him, Anne. I'd stop bawling if I was you or Gil might take it back.'_

 _Marilla recovered her senses and put a mop in his hand, and Rachel recovered her tongue. What she said I can't quite recall, though Providence was certainly invoked. And your handsomeness and my stubbornness, your patience and my temper and so on and so on and so on..._

 _It was past twelve before we left for Allwinds ~and past two by the time we arrived! When you walked me up to your door I felt like a bird fluttering in your big cat teeth. You seemed so terrifically pleased with yourself, but would your parents feel the same when they saw me on their porch, or would they see me off with a broom? I spied a table set with company in mind and felt even worse, clearly we had been expected for lunch and you'd never said a word!_

 _'I don't suppose you're hungry,' you mother said to me. Oh, what did she mean by that? Was she saying I had snubbed her meal? That I had a finicky appetite?_

 _'As it happens, Mrs Blythe, I'm famished!'  
_

 _'You are?' you said, your voice incredulous._

 _'You are?' your mother said, standing up once more. 'Well, we have some pie left warming in the oven,' and she disappeared into the kitchen._

 _'I'll see if Sarah wants a hand, the door to the stove sticks some,' your father said, leaving us with the cats._

 _Before you could open your mouth I pounced, wanting to know why you'd never told me your parents would be waiting for us. We were in the midst of a barely contained squabble when your father returned._

 _'Ah, I've missed that,' he said, winking at me. He invited us to the table where your mother was setting out tea things. There was a photograph of you on the dining room wall, dressed in your cap and gown, looking elated._

 _'We didn't really come here for pie, Mother~' you said, softly.  
_

 _I made a feeble attempt to disagree, even though we both knew I was so nervous I couldn't have eaten more than a crumb. You told them how sorry I was to be so late and that it was all your fault. While I stood there next to you unable to say a word, listening to you talk about me, listening to you talk for me. It was the strangest sensation. Then your hand grasped mine and you began to grin like that boy in the picture._

 _'Anne and I are getting married!' you exclaimed._

 _'You don't say,' said your mother._

 _'What, today?' said your father._

 _'In three years!' I blurted._

 _'So there's time for tea,' your mother said, and she gave me a wink. Her arms went around me, then your father's, then yours (!) then a hot cup was put in my hand, a cat made a home on my lap, and it was well past supper before I realised I was going to be late once again._

 _On Saturday I went to the Wrights. You offered to drive me there but I longed for a walk, and we agreed to see each other later that afternoon. I imagined I would find Diana in her back garden stringing the washing line in neat white squares. Instead she was out on her blue painted porch, little Fred dozing in his Moses basket while she dozed beside him. I crept up the stairs and placed a kiss on her head, and she opened her eyes and gave me the giddiest grin._

 _'You know!' I said, too surprised to be disappointed._

 _'Oh darling,' she squealed, 'I was going to pretend that I didn't because I wanted you to have the pleasure of announcing it, and even more I was just dying to know what you'd say! But I'm far too muzzy headed to keep up a pretense. I do know, but tell me anyway, won't you? I want to hear those impossible words come straight from my beloved's mouth.'_

 _And what do you think, I cried again! But Diana knew enough to let my tears fall. I believe it was the most delicious cry I've ever had, because all that hope and fear, nervousness and rapture could finally be let go. Her little boy woke up and joined me. Diana cried too, which was about the time you and Fred peered around the side of the house, expressions of glorious bafflement all over your hay covered heads._

 _'They cry a lot, these womenfolk,' Fred said to you, as though he was bestowing the wisdom of ages. 'Don't worry, Gil, you'll get used to it.'_

 _On Sunday I went to the Cuthbert pew and you went to the Blythe's. At the end of service I did my best to leave as quickly as seemed respectful but Rachel would latch onto my arm. She stood me right by the Reverend at the door of the church so that as the congregants offered their goodbyes to him they could offer their congratulations to me! I'll never forget you shaking Mr Bury's hand and then looking to reach for mine, and took no small satisfaction when Rachel yanked you into line.  
_

 _'Gilbert Blythe, you take your place by that you are affianced to.'_

 _Was there ever an uglier phrase for so beautiful and tender a state? And that was delicately put compared to those from Pyes and Sloanes._

 _'And they said all God's miracles have been used up,' said Josie, smiling sweetly._

 _'Let's hope for your sake they're not,' I replied._

 _'I never pegged you the sort to be satisfied with another fellow's leavings,' Charlie said smugly._

 _'How is Pandora?' you asked him._

 _But you know I rather preferred those comments to the well meaning ones that followed~_

 _'All that waiting paid off, eh, Gil!'_

 _'Anne Shirley, I always knew you had a hankering for Blythe.'_

 _'Good to see you two finally come to your senses.'_

 _If they only knew what part their words played as we lingered in the Fletcher's orchard later that evening. Remember..._

 _'Gilbert Blythe, why don't you come kiss that which you are affianced to?'_

 _'Anne Shirley, I always knew you had a hankering for... me.'_

 _On Monday the hours began to drop like apples. I held each moment with the tenderest, most careful of hands. But I couldn't stop them falling..._

 _On Tuesday the thought of us parting beat through my chest like the wings of a snow goose about to take flight. I kissed you with a closed mouth and when I ran down the drive that night I never once looked back._

 _On Wednesday morning you told me you were going to pack and make your farewells._

 _'I know you, Anne, every time you look at me you're thinking of Friday. I don't want my going to rob us of the days we have left so I'm saying goodbye to everyone now. Then I want us to meet up in the Haunted Wood this afternoon as though I had just arrived for the summer.'_

 _You did know me. You knew that the girl who could imagine she was the Queen of the Night or the Princess of Araby could easily imagine September was June. I wore my best dress and carried a picnic, and you wore your blue waistcoat and slung that tartan rug over your shoulder. We pretended we had two months together instead of two days. Next week we would drive up to White Sands for the bonfire on the beach, the week after that we might attend the Exhibition in Charlottetown. It was your turn to invent another day for us, instead you lay back on the rug and said quietly,_

 _'I'm afraid my imagination isn't as vivid as yours.' I lay down beside you, our knees were touching and our hands were knotted together. You pressed your head against my own and said, 'I don't want to leave you, Anne, when every single part of me is begging to stay.'_

 _I felt scared and relieved in the same moment, and so woefully confused. I knew I should make you see sense, tell you how the days would fly and Christmas would come all too soon. Instead I said~_

 _'Don't go.'_

 _I expected you to laugh or tease me at least. Instead you said~_

 _'I won't.'_

 _And a dream we had both secretly yearned for tumbled out of our mouths._

 _'I'll apprentice myself to the apothecary in Carmody...'_

 _'I'll ask for my old place at Avonlea school, they've never been happy with that new fellow...'_

 _'We could put an offer on the old white cottage behind the Harris place... It needs a roof and a porch and a door or two, but we could fix it up...'_

 _'Plant apple trees all round it...'_

 _'And mayflowers everywhere...'_

 _'Put muslin curtains in the windows...'_

 _'With dogs and cats and babies peeping out from every one...'_

 _'Lots of babies...'_

 _'Lots and lots of babies...'_

 _'And we'll hold them tight and tell each one how much we love them.'_

 _'How much do we love them, Anne?' you asked me. In your voice I heard our children, if any sunlight had remained I would have seen them in your eyes._

 _'We love them so much,' I said, kissing your fingers, and probably my own, 'that we gave up a little white cottage...'_

 _'And the apple trees?'_

 _'And the mayflowers... We parted even though we had to cleave our hearts in two to do it. And we cried...'_

 _'Who said we cried?'_

 _I put soft kisses on your eyelids, which were as salty and wet as my own. 'Don't forget, Gilbert Blythe,' I said, 'I know you, too.'_

 _On Thursday you placed your grandmother's ring on my finger._

 _On Friday you were gone._

 _ **... ... ...** _

**_* the tartan rug was first referred to in RD4 chapter XL_**


	10. Well and Good

**X  
**

 **Harvey House, Redmond, K'port**

 **March 1st**

 _Hello Anne-o-mine,_

 _Happy Birthday, darling girl. I've been searching every shop in Kingsport hunting for something that spoke of your spirit yet can still be boxed up and sent through the mail. I turns out no such object exists, which is why I bought you a silver chain (I hope you heeded the note I scrawled on the packet telling you to open it first) that I am imagining is now nestled round your neck._

 _It was your letter that inspired the idea because reading about our week together reminded me of when I asked you about the heart pendant I sent some Christmases ago. That awkward conversation wasn't mentioned, I noticed -though my blubbing was._

 _I could have cried again when I read your words, mostly with relief. I know you love me, Anne, I know it. What I don't always know is how to love you back. I want so much to get it right. It will sound conceited but a fellow can't get where I've got without getting a lot of things right. With you I never wanted to be right so much in my life, and was never so scared of getting it wrong. As soon as I sent that letter I felt entirely wrong. I wanted to show you how much I missed you, instead all I proved was how unforbearing I can be over something so paltry as a stretch of ice._

 _I should have dunked myself right in it. I needed cooling off, and how. I thought it would be a strain to wait for your reply. But instead of reading over your letters until I'm sure I'll wear out the ink, I caught up on my neglected correspondence, made a few more chums, and let myself be here instead of always wanting to be somewhere else. That little white cottage for one._

 _I think about that night a lot. More than I think about kissing you there and there and there... More than I think of you running down the drive and into my arms, almost as much as the moment I knew you wanted to be my wife. I never felt so close to you as when we talked about our very small, very ordinary dream. We've always had a knack for pushing each other to make more of ourselves and I love you for that, Anne. There isn't a woman in a thousand who would willingly part from their husband-to-be for three years. You did it because you know ambition burns in me just as it burns in you._

 _Then you said, 'Don't go.' I heard how much you needed me and my ambition meant nothing. I would have sacrificed it all in a second, I wasn't even sorry and that's what I think about most. I felt so calm, more than that, I felt serenely happy to give it up for you._

 _When I arrived at Redmond all I could think is why am living where Anne is not? I don't have to be a doctor, I could teach or get a position on a paper, and start my life now instead of in three years. Knowing you needed me; it's different to being wanted or even loved. To be needed by a woman as self possessed as you are, it just about broke me when I was trying to get strong again.  
_

 _There's something else I want to mention. My head is telling me not to but it's used to being overruled when it comes to you. When I had the fever last July, when I got really bad, I think I told you that I sometimes heard your voice. Some things are foggy but there's one thing you said I will never forget. 'Don't go,' you said. Just that, 'Don't go.' You weren't begging me or crying. If anything you sounded stunned that I could ever consider leaving when I had so much more still to do._

 _When I heard you say those words again I remembered how hard I fought to live and I couldn't stand to defer my happiness one minute longer. Have you ever been close to death, Anne? I hope you don't consider that an impertinent question, there's just so much about you I still don't know. I only wondered because being near death fills a body with so much life. That's what I meant when I said I look at a picture of Fred's family and want the same for us. All of a sudden I want babies. I never really thought about being a father before, I never really got beyond the thought of kissing you. Now I imagine you with child, with my child, and- I don't know how to end that thought except to say I think about that just as much as I think about you saying yes to me._

 _I want to thank you again for capturing that week. It means so much to see it all through your eyes; the things that clearly meant a lot, the things that obviously rankled, and things you never mentioned at all. I wondered about those and though I'm no writer I thought perhaps I could add to the story of us._

 _When I left you at the gate it must have been after one and I don't think I got to my room until two. I just sat there on the porch steps for what felt like hours, staring up at the stars as though I'd never seen them before. It was only the thought of seeing you first thing that hustled me up to bed. I attempted to creep up the stairs only to see Pup peering from his doorway wanting to know if I was alright. All I could manage was the vaguest of nods and when he nodded back and I could almost hear the words, Yep, John, the boy's going to be just fine._

 _I woke just before dawn to the sounds of him and Mam in the kitchen. Nothing unusual about that, until I saw what Mam was doing. Ironing my best shirt._

 _'Just thought you might want it today,' she said._

 _So I said, 'Might as well wear it as you're ironing it.'_

 _And was out of the house before she could get a bowl of oats down me._

 _When I walked up your drive I could see your boot-prints in the red dirt. I wanted to run but Green Gables looked so still and quiet I decided to find somewhere to sit (under Anne Shirley's window seemed as good a place as any) and wait for the house to stir. As to what I expected next I didn't much care, I just sat on that stump and felt the rising sun warm my back and thought about the girl beyond the east gable window who wanted to be my wife. I never gave serious thought to asking Marilla's permission, I wasn't sure if I was supposed to. Truth be told the dream I had for you and me never got as far as this point._

 _Afterwards, when we were about to head off to Allwinds, Rachel began fussing with your hair and I felt Marilla's hand on my shoulder.  
_

 _She said, 'I can't tell you how glad I am.'  
_

 _And I said, 'That makes two of us.'_

 _She didn't laugh or even smile, she just gazed at me for as long as it took for you to submit to Rachel's wet thumb wiping away imaginary smudges. I've always been guarded around Marilla. She's not a frequent guest at Allwinds and lived the sort of life -she and Matthew- that folks in Avonlea consider solitary and austere. I would characterize her in the same way, she never looked as if she wanted friends and never went out of her way to make any. Still, there's something about her; as children we would all laugh at Mrs Lynde behind her back but never Miss Cuthbert. Half the time the teasing comments I got for being sweet on you were about Marilla. They'd say she would never let you marry, much less go courting. That if the idea of taming you into a respectable wife wasn't enough to make me change my mind, the thought of Marilla Cuthbert as my mother-in-law surely would._

 _I did think she could be unfairly hard on you and sometimes wished you might have found yourself a family that doted on you the way the Barrys did Diana, or my own mother doted on me. It seemed to me that the rumours about Pup and Marilla must have been invented or at least overblown. But when I felt her hand on my shoulder and her eyes lock on mine I understood what my father must have loved in her. And as if Marilla knew what I was thinking she slapped my back so hard I almost tumbled down the porch steps._

 _That night it was me who was peering round doors. I could hear my mother making hiccup sounds which meant she was trying to stop crying, and saw my father rubbing her back the way he does when Mam feels fragile. As I write this I'm wary of you thinking my mother's tears go a long way to prove her dislike of you. But I'm telling you this because the opposite is true. Remember what a wise woman once said to me? That her very happiest moments had been when she had tears in her eyes. My folks are happy for me, happy for us, and one day you'll know that just as I do._

 _If you remember the only one who had reservations to begin with was Fred. I never told the Wrights about our engagement, the news got there without any help from this quarter. I was there to help with the end of the hay harvest. I found Fred in the barn and the first thing he said when he saw me was,_

 _'You know for someone who supposedly has a heap of brains you can be a real dope.'_

 _'It's one of the few things we have in common,' I joked._

 _He didn't laugh either and I soon discovered why. That was when he brought up your refusal in April. He knew about Charlie, too, and a 'rich man in Kingsport' -which I can only assume is Gardner. The reason I'm not certain is because I discovered there are far more fellows who asked for hand of Miss Shirley than I ever suspected. According to Fred Billy Andrews also proposed (that can't be true, can it, Anne, not Billy?) and another besides.  
_

 _He began working broken ends of straw into little horse figures. I know when Fred can't meet my eye there's something he wants to say and is stewing over how to say it. He must have made his son an entire herd before he spoke again._

 _'I'm afraid it's romance she wants. Might be the thought of you dying made her go weak at the knees.'_

 _I did laugh then. 'Trust me, Fred,' I said, 'it's not my dying that does that.'_

 _'You want Anne Shirley, well and good. But don't wed her, Gil, she ain't the wifely sort.'  
_

 _You know our Fred is built like an ox but I wasn't about to let anyone say that about you. I stood up and took a swipe at him, then he laughed._

 _'You're not looking for a fight are you, Blythe, a little skinned rabbit like you?'_

 _'Married life's made you soft,' I said, 'you've gone all to fat.'_

 _I took another swing and this one connected._

 _'Oh, now you've done it!' Fred roared, lunging at me._

 _I'd like to be able to tell you your husband-to-be was victorious but I was pinned to the ground within two minutes. He said he wouldn't let me up until I saw sense. I wanted to tell him he'd better get used to living in a barn, but to be honest I was finding it hard to breathe. I was probably purple by the time he rolled off me and we lay in the straw and stared up the pigeons roosting in the rafters._

 _I thought about the time we hid up there to smoke my father's pipe, then compared our stripes the next day when we both took a whipping for it. How we nearly expired one summer competing to see who could haul the most sacks into the barn, and when I found him in the hayloft weeping for his old dog. A year later we were lying in the same spot tasting cider for the first time, and he asked me did I want Diana because he thought Diana wanted me. A year after that I told him I had made up my mind to wait for you. He called me a dope then too, but I won that particular scrap. All my life the fellow kept me laughing, kept me standing when I got cut down, and knows better than most when it comes to you I lose all sense and reason. I did what I could to ease his mind, but nothing I said came close to what you did._

 _There you were having a good old cry with Diana. The moment you saw me you rushed to my side, brushing straw from my hair and shoulders while Fred looked on with undisguised amazement.  
_

 _'Fred Wright', you said, 'close your mouth and see to your family while I attend to mine.'_

 _You can't have known how I felt to hear you describe me like that, Anne. Though I might have given you a fair idea when I grabbed your arm and lead you down the side of the house. And pressed you into their redbrick chimney and I kissed you as many times as I could before Diana called us in for tea._

 _ **... ... ...** _


	11. Living and Dying

**XI  
**

 **Windy Willows, Spooks Lane, S'side**

 **April 8th**

 _P.S. 1. Never, never, never shall I forget Cyrus Taylor's face when his wife accused him of crocheting. But I shall always like him because he hunted for those kittens. And I like Esme for standing up for her father under the supposed wreck of all her hopes._

 _P.S. 2. I have put in a new pen. And I love you because you aren't pompous like Dr Carter... and I love you because you haven't got sticky out ears like Johnny. And... the very best reason of all... I love you just for being Gilbert!_

 _P.S. 3. Please see the letter inside this letter..._

 _ **... ... ...** _

_I hope you can read my tiny writing. I wrote the pages below in response to a question in your previous letter and then changed my mind about sending it. You see I can be just as uncompromising as you can when it comes to getting things right. Do you suppose that's because so much has gone wrong between us, or simply because our competitive spirits are so utterly ineradicable? (Is that a word? Well now it is!) You sounded so happy after all the disappointment of Christmas I felt loathe to cast a cloud upon your much deserved sunshine. But I am also aware of your habit for seizing on questions and never giving up till you've had your answer. It's a wonderful, maddening quality, and while some things really are best forgotten I believe what I have written below is something you'll want to know._

 _A.S._

 _...I know you were attempting to explain to me your unquenchable thirst for life (which apparently includes dust ups in barnhouses, Gilbert Blythe, you're twenty-six!) but I went cold inside when you asked me if I ever been close to death._

 _It's not that I'm afraid, I am grateful to have shared those last weeks with with Ruby and feel blessed to have been there for Matthew. I am glad it was my face he saw and my arms he felt when he said goodbye to this world. I've known others who have died and seen even more come close. I really did have an odd little childhood compared to my Avonlea chums. When Minnie-May came down with croup I was appalled that Diana and Mary-Jo didn't have the least idea how to treat it ~what did they teach these Island girls! You'll think me odder still when I tell you that once the worst was over the first person I thought of was you. I had just delivered Minne-May to safety, had the tears of Diana and astonishment of the doctor to my credit, and the only thing I cared about was missing school and losing my place at the top of the class to a certain unmentionable person! I really was an insufferable beast now I think on it. Death was simply a part of life, the best one could do was keep out of the way. But I begged death to come for me the night I believed you were dying._

 _Fred Wright had it more right that you suppose when he said the thought of losing you brought me to my knees. Because it did, though there was nothing romantic about it. In no way am I likening my pain to yours. I have seen my share of typhoid, I know my dearest love, what you will have endured. I almost wish I didn't, that my picture of you was of a beautiful youth who languished through the night with a perfect fevered brow. Instead the moment I discovered how ill you were I had only one thought, that you weren't strong enough to survive. I'd seen you transform from the brawny boy who lead the charge at Rush Week to the wraith who walked away from me at Convocation. I knew what would be required to fight your illness and in my heart I felt that death had come for you, too.  
_

 _I knelt at my window and began to hate the distance between us. Those beautiful miles of Shining Water and Haunted Wood, I wanted to torch it all, eviscerate every branch and blade of grass. I kept thinking if it didn't exist then I could be with you. Instead two miles might just as well have been two thousand because I had no right, no chance to be there at the end with you. It doesn't seem possible of me, I know, but nothing else will convey how desperate I was. If that sounds selfish then I was selfish. I gave into despair and grief and raged at a God that could take a man who had so much still to give._

 _I saw then how essential you were to me. More necessary than writing, more cherished than Phil or Diana, more beloved than Marilla or Green Gables itself. Though it hurts to even think of living without them there is a strange sort of solace in knowing I have the grace to let them go. I believe there is something inside me that would dig its roots even deeper and grow even stronger. I also believe if you had died that part of me would go to the grave with you. Just as there can be no sound without silence or sea without salt, there could be no Anne ~no Anne I recognise~ without you, Gilbert. Knowing this makes me afraid sometimes but I don't know another way to love._

 _All through the night I rejoiced in my love just as I prepared to lose it. It felt like a balm and a poison. There was sweet consolation that I had at least known a love like yours, yet it sickened me to think you believed me betrothed to someone else. And it hurt as nothing ever had to remember you reaching out for me. Each time you tried to convince me to give up my grudge, or refused to crow after besting me in class, when you rescued me at the pond, and grasped at my hand when I finally offered it ~oh it was love, love, love and I didn't see it. Love when you went through Euclid with me for the hundredth time, love when you gave up a Spring afternoon to study. Love each time you walked me home, when you waited at the gate, when you took me to your secret tree, and every single day we shared at Redmond. How many chances had I been given? And now when I knew what I had you were going to die. It was unbearable to me, Gilbert, you must see why in that moment I wanted my life to end._

 _I always imagined true love would anoint me like the softest blessing, that it would fall into all my faults and cracks and finally make me whole. But it demands far more of me than that. I doubted your strength, it's true, but I refused to doubt my own. You once told me that life will only give you what you fight for, and I remember bending every thought to you. The gale outside did its utmost to drown out my prayers, the rain seemed to spit at me, but I couldn't let you go. If you heard me, if ever my voice was carried to you it would have been then. I was as wild and desperate as any forsaken child calling for home. And you were home to me, Gilbert. You always will be._

 _In the morning He took pity on me, the God I had forsaken, and sent me an angel in the shape of Pacifique Buote. Just like his name that boy brought me peace because he told me you would live. I fell to the ground (exactly as Fred said I would) but unlike you I was content to live on my knees. No thanks, no prayer could ever convey my gratitude to a world that gave a wretched girl such a perfect miracle. Such grace and humbleness you never saw in me, Gil, if only it lasted longer than the month that passed until I could see you again. Because as much as I wished it enough that you lived I couldn't make it true. I wanted you to love me as I loved you, and could no more hide it from the world than I could hide the colour of my hair._

 _My father had red hair, did I ever tell you that? And my mother had grey eyes just like mine. And they loved me, Gilbert. They loved me fiercely in the short time we had together and there really is nothing else you need to know. I'm just like you, remember? I want to give you the best of me, too._

 _ **… … …**_

 **Harvey House, Redmond, K'port**

 **April 15th**

 _...you do give me the best of yourself, even if it feels as though you're showing me your worst. Your anger, your despair, your Queenish moods, your prickly ones, you are true to all your Annes and honour them all. There isn't an ounce of the false in you. Being with you, it's like drinking from the clearest, sweetest spring. I feel revived and excited, all my doubts fall away, I know what's right and I follow it without any hesitation. And whatever path I take there you are urging me on. When I woke from the fever, when I really awoke, Mam read me Phil's letter and all I could hear was you.  
_

 _There's nowhere on that Rock for you to simply buy it, she wrote. If there's something you want you must make it yourself, and if you fail you either find the will to try again or learn to live without it._

 _There's no way Phil could have understood this if you hadn't told her. Those were your words, and you weren't only describing the Island. We both fought hard to get where we are, but I know what I have I owe to my folks. I could never have done all I've done if I hadn't been raised a Blythe, and I've always wondered where you found your fight when you had nothing at all._

 _I can almost bring myself to let go of that question because in many ways you've answered it. Every time you write about your Little Elizabeth you tell me about yourself. With her different moods and different names -Betty one hour and Lizzie the next- her loneliness, her dread of being unwanted, and her unquenchable belief in the land of Tomorrow. If you hadn't sent me that photograph of the two of you on your birthday I would think you had conjured her from memory.  
_

 _Each afternoon you come to the fence with your cup of milk as though she was a wild and wounded animal and you were hoping to earn her trust. Each day you tame her a little more and in return she gives you a little more of herself. And you take it all, you accept her strangeness and her fears and show her that it's safe to love you. I can't help thinking as you tend to that child you wish you had been given the same care. And I want to believe, or ask at least, if there was ever such a person for you._

 _It's hard to let that question go, but I know now I am asking it for my sake not yours. I need to know you had someone to watch over you because I can't stand the thought of that little twig being left to fend for herself. To think the first thing I ever said to you was carrots. Every time I picture your fairy child next door I feel my foolheadedness all over again. Please just do one thing for me, tell Elizabeth to keep a slate handy, she'll need it for all the henhouse roosters destined to come her way._

 _ **... ... ...** _

_*** Phil's letter to Gilbert first mentioned in RD4 chapter XL**_


	12. Water and Fire

**XII**

 **Windy Willows, Spook's Lane, S'side**

 **May 30th**

 _DEAREST AND THEN MORE DEAR_

 _It's Spring!_

 _Perhaps you, up to your eyes in a welter of exams in Kingsport, don't know it. But I am aware of it from the crown of my head to the tips of my toes... Just another month and I'll be home for vacation! I keep thinking of the old orchard at Green Gables with its trees full of snow... the old bridge over the Lake of Shining Waters... the murmur of the sea in your ears... a Summer afternoon in Lover's Lane... and you!_

 _I have just the right kind of pen tonight, Gilbert, and so I decided to write this letter in the bath. But my one and only attempt stuck fast to my knees and left inky smudges all over my thighs. So then I had to be sensible ~have you ever noticed that we don't ever want to be sensible, we are compelled to be so~ and scrubbed away for a good long while. (For advice on that matter may I recommend salt, my limbs now glow like a milky moon.)_

 _I love to bathe because I become acquainted with my body again. I don't suppose you'd understand, you look down and see two finely trousered legs. Whereas I sometimes have the notion that the female species doesn't walk so much as hover. Though Mrs Gibson would say otherwise. As if wearing a collarless dress wasn't evidence enough of my reckless morals she has deemed my skirts far too skimpy and claimed ~hark this~ that she could see a full three inches of ankle! I must have grown, I told her, because I can assure you that the maker of those skirts, the extremely upright and wholesome Mrs Rachel Lynde no less, would turn Methodist before she allowed a woman to appear as if she could walk._

 _Presently I am covered up, but somehow I think neither Mrs Lynde or Mrs Gibson would approve of my attire (though there's not a toe to be seen) because I'm still in my towel. Pray tell, Mr Blythe, what do you find more morally reckless, writing to you in the bath or in a towel? While you think on that I shall get myself under my quilt..._

 _Hello again. Mmmmm, I definitely feel morally reckless now. Would you like to know why? Because I'm wearing nothing at all. My crisp white sheets feel utterly sinful, I seem to silk all over them ~silk really wants to be a verb, I think. Have you ever had a sensation that felt like silk against your skin only it occurred inside you not outside? Because that's how I feel right now. As I write this I'm lying on my stomach, my knees are bent and my feet are making the bedclothes into a sort of tent. When I move them I can feel little flurries of cold air shiver all over me and it's bliss, bliss, bliss, bliss, bliss..._

 _ **May 31st**_

 _Good morning, my Darling,_

 _How satisfying it will be to say that to you instead of write it. Just think, Gil, one day in our not too distant futures I shall awake to find not a blue doughnut cushion lying next to me but your curly head. Can I say that now we are engaged? Perhaps I should have asked that before I commenced writing. I have just read over what I have written and made myself blush. It was only that I happened to be in a coppery bath sort of mood and did intend to continue writing in that vein._

 _I had been thinking about a favourite tree of mine ~you know how I am about trees. The beech by the swimming hole on the Wright's side of the Lake. What is it like to swim there, Gilbert? I always wanted to know. And no, my travails as Elaine don't count! It always sounded delightful but I was certain it must have felt even more so. All that cool clear water on your bare skin... Diana and I often dipped our feet in but that seemed to require more restraint than it offered relief; I wanted to put the rest of me in, too! I did enjoy drying off, however. We would lie under the canopy of thoughtful tree, our heads in the shade and our calves on the sun. When the sun hit our hips we knew it was time to head home for lunch. Alternatively, when the shade crept down to our toes we would know it was time for tea. But I preferred the sun on my hips, my heavy skirts seemed to soak in the heat till I thought they would ignite._

 _Where was I? Trees! Yes I was thinking of sitting in my favourite tree and then Aunt Kate came creeping into my room to buttermilk her face (Aunt Chatty always comes a half hour earlier. How they have never met up with each other ~though I suspect Rebecca Dew might know the answer.) So I hunkered under the blankets lest she suspect I was as undressed as it's possible to be, and pretended to be asleep. And what did she do? Extinguished my lamp and took the matchbox with her!_

 _Now it's the dawn of the last day of May. The dearest, pinkest rays are painting light upon your letter and I am imagining you coming to my room and whipping the pen from my hand._

 _'Enough of that', you tell me. Then you kiss every finger just to be sure, because there is no way I could hold anything but you after that._

 _I am now imagining you laughing at the idea that you could wrestle a pen from my hand. But as I said, this is a (deliciously improper) dream._

 _But if it was real, Gil, if you were lying next to me... what would I do?_

 _It's been years since we've had a whole Summer together, and all that I dreamed of for months. But now that it's nearly here I feel... I feel... I feel EVERYTHING in such gushing amounts I'm almost overwhelmed. Not by you, but by us. There are times when I cast an eye over my neglected writing or pore over my beloved photographs of home and I think, I hope Gilbert isn't expecting to spend every day with me. I am afraid to be near you. I feel so papery thin, so ready to yield to the merest brush of your hand, I'm certain I'll combust the moment you touch me.  
_

 _Other times I wish I didn't have to share you with anyone. I want every minute of those longed for months to be with you and you alone. I want to walk our paths and talk for hours. I want to listen to you read aloud and breathe in every word you say. Did you know you smell like meadow grass? And birch bark and freshly ironed shirts. And you feel like a stone that's been warmed by the sun, solid, warm and so utterly touchable. Have you ever noticed that my face seems to fit against your shoulder as though it had been made for just that purpose. And when it rests there I can hear your heart beating as if you needed every inch of your chest to contain it. I wonder if I'll find you changed and whether you'll find me so. Oh, I want to gaze at you for hours at a time, and kiss you even longer..._

 _Mostly, Gil, I just want to lie by your side. And if I burn I burn._

 _ **… … …**_

 **Harvey House, Redmond, K'port**

 **June 12th**

 _…Anne I want that, too. I think back over this last year and it's not what I thought it would be. For one I was sure I would see you at least once. I never quite expected you to take up my dare to come see me on my birthday but that didn't stop me looking out the window of Patterson street every time I heard a gate swing shut. I had roses for you, too. Fifteen, just like the pearls in your ring, to give you before we went to Christine's party. I wanted to watch you open your Christmas present not hear about it's opening a month later. And on your birthday I wanted to be the one to place that chain round your neck and see if that little heart nestled between your collarbones the way I always imagined it would. I was sure you would have met The Fox by now, and when our crew missed out to St Stephens's at the May regatta I couldn't help hoping you were there at the finish line waiting to give me a consolatory kiss. It doesn't seem possible that in all that time I haven't touched you once, or seen you. And it's maddening because I know that I can. I know that you want me to._

 _Your letters, they're nothing to the real live Anne but they have become everything to me. I never could have predicted our distance to produce such a gift. I should have known, because somehow out of all our trials comes the most surprising joy._

 _I found a way to describe you. It only took the best part of the year -and too many akavits and small hour debates with Mr Rasmussen. It's not clever or even pretty, merely true. But as truth is the best part of you, Anne (coppery bath sorts of moods running a very close second) I think it suits you best of all. The Fox and myself were rollicking back from a celebratory night at the Saturday Club, yes I know it's Thursday but it was also the last day of exams. The Fox was feeling particularly pleased because the Chem paper was actually intelligible this year, and I was happy because I could finally fling that 600 page brick into the river now that I can prove how to handle a bandage._

 _We somehow ended up in our room and I somehow ended up with one of your letters in my hand. He slumped on my bed next to me and said, For pity's sake, Coop, tell me how it's done?_

 _I tucked your letter away from his eyes, he was beyond reading at that point but I don't want anyone else to see one word you've written, not even an envelope. I can't explain it, I just feel if I let anyone in I won't hear you anymore, I won't see you, or smell you. By the way, you smell of rosemary, though I suppose you already know that. But what you may not know is that on you rosemary transforms into something else. When I touch your hair it releases a fragrance that seems almost alive, like sun after a big rain, you know the line-_

 _The good stars met in your horoscope, made you of spirit, fire and dew..._

 _That's you, Anne. Though it's not what I told The Fox._

 _'How what's done?' I asked him. 'And this had better not be about Boyle's Law because you can't go back and change your answer now.'_

 _'Tell me how you get a woman to adore you like that?' he said.  
_

 _'You have to adore her first,' I said. 'Not all your life but half of it at least. Only you can't let her know, you have to hold it in-'_

 _'Like a belch?'_

 _(It will go some way to demonstrate the how very Saturday Clubbed I was because I agreed with him. That doesn't make it true, but The Fox is a fellow who needs things explained to him in a way that he can comprehend. You should see the mnemonics I invented in order for him to remember chemistry formulations -actually, you shouldn't.)_

 _'You definitely feel like exploding,' I told him. 'You try so hard not to it's all you can think of. In the end you can't help it. You make a mess of everything and then she surprises you-'_

 _'Because she belches too-'_

 _'Because you discover she likes the mess.'_

 _'Now you're pulling my leg, he said, there isn't any girl who likes a mess.'  
_

 _That's when I knew exactly what kind of woman you are._

 _'Ah, but you see, Ed, she's not any girl. She's an Anne-girl.'_

 _My deliciously improper, fearless, and dearest Anne-girl. Please don't worry about summer. After the year we've had I've let go my expectations and decided the world can surprise me. But I promise if you look in danger of combusting I'll do my best to rain all over you -though now I think on it I'm rather fond of you dripping wet. In which case it might be better if we suffer through the heat. I've done my share of that and I won't lie, it burns._

 _But then something impossible happens. You are reborn.  
_

 _ **… … …**_

 *** Good stars met in your horoscope... is a fragment from Evelyn Hope by Robert Browning. (Fun fact, in Anne of Green Gables where this is quoted Maud actually added an extra 'and'. Cheeky! That being so I feel far more free and easy when quoting her now. Cheers, Maud.)  
**

 **... ... ...**

 **Thank you for reading. I had the loveliest time in Anne-land and I hope you did too. I always thought this would be a small story, that four or six chapters would be enough for each year, giving you a short tale you could read in an hour. What I didn't take into account was that if Anne asks Gilbert a question then you would assume he would reply in his next letter, which would be sent the following week not the following month, which meant the year took longer to cover, and is why this story got so big.**

 **Anyway I see this story as a kind of a getting to know you, how do we do this, super into you, kind of thing. The rest of the world just fades away which is just as it should be when you fall in love.**

 **More Windy Willows Love Letters will be next, and shall be passionate with a capital T, as well as delve into Anne's past. (I haven't read Budge's book so I won't reference that.)  
**

 **The Last of the Windy Willows Love Letters will be about them working out their futures, (there will be disagreements) the Patty's Place girls, and the Avonlea folks.  
**

 **Does that sound ok?  
**

 **Thank you again. I am nervous because I've never written a story without the benefit of your comments and reviews, and am very aware I may have gone wrong without having you there to right me.  
**

 **kwak**


End file.
